Principal Engineer

About the Role

Curriculum Associates is seeking a Principal Engineer to join our team in Bangalore. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction and ensuring the long-term health of your designated domain. You will be responsible for designing and implementing scalable, reliable systems that are critical to both student and educator workflows. Your contributions will be essential in driving platform modernization, enhancing performance, and advocating for responsible refactoring.

This position involves leading the development of Java/Spring Boot microservices, contributing to ReactJS development, and upholding rigorous standards for code quality, testing, and interface design. You will also play a key role in leading complex, multi-team integrations, ensuring alignment of data contracts, interfaces, and ownership. A significant aspect of this role is influencing stakeholders across engineering, product management, and partner teams, promoting the adoption of reusable patterns, and preventing the proliferation of siloed solutions.

Ownership extends to the reliability, performance, uptime, and on-call readiness of your systems. You will lead incident analysis, implement long-term fixes, and define key Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Additionally, you will ensure secure design practices are followed and optimize cloud costs for your services. Mentoring engineers at all levels in design, debugging, system thinking, and architectural patterns is a core responsibility, as is partnering with Engineering Managers on architecture, quality, predictability, and team development. Active participation in CA-wide technical forums and engineering communities is highly encouraged.

Key Responsibilities

• Own architecture, technical direction, and long-term system health for your domain.
• Design scalable, reliable systems used across student and educator workflows.
• Maintain clear, up-to-date architectural documentation and drive CA-wide standards.
• Lead development of Java/Spring Boot microservices and contribute to ReactJS where needed.
• Ensure high-quality code, strong testing discipline, and clean interfaces.
• Drive platform modernization, performance improvements, and responsible refactoring.
• Lead complex, multi-team integrations and align data contracts, interfaces, and ownership.
• Influence engineers, fellow PEs, EMs, PMs, and partner teams without authority.
• Promote reusable patterns and prevent siloed or bespoke solutions.
• Own reliability, performance, uptime, and on-call readiness for your systems.
• Lead incident analysis, drive long-term fixes, and define meaningful SLIs/SLOs.
• Ensure secure design practices and optimise cloud cost for your services.
• Mentor engineers at all levels in design, debugging, system thinking, and patterns.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager on architecture, quality, predictability, and team development.
• Contribute actively to CA-wide technical forums and engineering communities.

Qualifications

• 12-18 years of experience building large-scale backend or full-stack systems.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, distributed systems, microservices, and APIs.
• Working knowledge of ReactJS and front-end integration patterns.
• Strong debugging skills in production-scale distributed environments.
• Solid grounding in databases, caching, queues, CI/CD, containers, and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to design and evolve complex systems supporting high-scale student/teacher products.
• Proven ability to influence multiple teams with strong decision-making and trade-off analysis.
• Track record of raising engineering standards and mentoring senior engineers.
• Experience owning production systems, SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with AWS or Azure cloud ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of secure development and privacy considerations for student data.
• Experience with the PHP/LAMP stack is a plus.
• Experience in EdTech or large-scale learning platforms is highly desirable.
• Exposure to ML/AI-powered personalization workflows is a bonus.