Principal Engineer

Overview

Hands-on individual contributor role with broad technical influence across multiple Engineering teams, setting technical direction for key parts of Modulr's payments platform.

What you'll do

• Lead design, analysis and documentation of products, systems or subsystems, setting the technical direction for key parts of the platform.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership on the most complex areas of the platform, pairing with teams, unblocking hard engineering problems and raising the quality bar.
• Take principal ownership of core framework components such as the workflow engine, rules/decision engine and event-driven orchestration layer, defining patterns and abstractions that other teams reuse.
• Design and evolve event-driven architectures that support real-time decisioning, auditability and replay across multiple domains.
• Lead the design and implementation of agentic AI-driven workflows, orchestrating services and AI components to assist human operators while keeping decisions explainable and controlled.
• Define and own domain models, service boundaries and integration contracts, using domain-driven design and hexagonal architecture to keep systems loosely coupled and vendor-agnostic.
• Drive engineering standards, tooling and processes, from code quality and testing through to observability, reliability and security.
• Develop and execute test procedures for software.
• Proactively identify issues, bottlenecks, gaps or opportunities and either directly affect change or advocate for that change.
• Work in an agile environment (Scrum or Kanban).
• Document best practices, guides, systems design, reference architectures and implementations.
• Participate in design and code reviews.
• Contribute to the evolution of the architecture to make it more flexible and easier to use.
• Be an ambassador for technical excellence within Modulr and externally by representing Modulr at events and conferences.

What you'll need

• Able to clearly communicate architectural goals and standards.
• Ability to deep dive into technical problems and customer-led challenges.
• Strong analytical thinking, problem-solving, appropriate judgement and decision-making skill.
• Commitment to collaboration and teamwork.
• Proven ability to effectively manage timelines and deliverables.
• Thrives in complex, rapidly changing environments and can make sound judgements amid ambiguity.
• Self-starter, motivated team player who thrives in a fast-paced environment.
• Enjoys shaping architecture as well as code, guiding service boundaries, contracts, and writing complex frameworks and event models that other teams build on.
• Strong track record of building high-scale, reliable systems, comfortable designing for resilience, observability and graceful degradation from day one.
• Comfortable building event-driven and data-driven platforms.
• Curious/passionate about AI and automation, and thinks carefully about where agents/LLMs add real value while staying within risk and control boundaries.
• Expert in Java with deep experience building and operating distributed microservices in a cloud environment, at scale.
• Expert in OOPs and design patterns.
• Expert in REST API design.
• Strong practical knowledge of event-driven architectures.
• Experience with open-source technologies such as Spring and Hibernate.
• Strong background in observability and reliability.
• Experience with open-source RDBMS technologies such as PostgreSQL.
• Experience testing across different levels of applications and advocating for best practice.

Nice to have

• Experience with compliance / risk / FinCrime domains.
• Hands-on experience designing or integrating workflow engines.
• Experience with rules / decision engines and a clear view on how to manage rule lifecycle, versioning and testing at scale.
• Experience/understanding of agentic / AI-driven systems and how to integrate them into backend workflows with appropriate guardrails, monitoring and fallbacks.
• Exposure to payment schemes/flows, regulatory frameworks, SME/partner onboarding; experience reducing false positives via rule tuning/enrichment; familiarity with schema governance and data-lineage tooling is a strong plus.

Details

• Location: Pune.