Principal Engineer (NodeJS/Python) - Bengaluru

Overview Own core system architecture as Principal Engineer at Live2.ai. A hands-on individual contributor role focused on distributed systems, tenant isolation, reliability, and correctness, working alongside the Head of Engineering with no direct reports. Company Details Live2.ai is building an AI-native Social Content & Campaign Intelligence OS for global consumer brands. It helps brands monitor, audit, analyse, and act on intelligence across social content, influencer campaigns, user-generated content, and commerce. The company works with Fortune 500 global enterprise brands. Website: https://live2.ai/ Requirements - Around 8+ years of experience building and operating production systems, with continued responsibility after launch. - Deep hands-on experience with distributed systems, including service boundaries, queues, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, retries, idempotency, concurrency, consistency, and failure recovery. - Deep experience with relational data modelling and PostgreSQL, including indexing, partitioning, transactions, query optimisation, migrations, and multi-tenant data isolation. - Experience scaling systems through horizontal scaling, caching, workload partitioning, rate limiting, backpressure, and performance optimisation. - Experience designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, disaster recovery, recovery point and recovery time objectives, and safe reprocessing. - Hands-on knowledge of authentication, authorisation, role-based access control, tenant isolation, encryption, auditability, and enterprise security requirements. - Experience architecting production AI/LLM components, including model abstraction, asynchronous inference, evaluation, versioning, cost controls, and traceability. - Experience designing systems with guarantees around immutability, traceability, and reproducibility, with clear reasoning behind the trade-offs. - Ability to make and defend architectural decisions involving cost, complexity, and operational risk. - Ability to challenge a founder or Head of Engineering through written, evidence-based reasoning. - Continue to write production code regularly. The stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL with pgvector, OpenSearch, Redis, GCP, Kubernetes/GKE, Docker, and AI/LLM infrastructure. Experience with every technology is not expected. Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, cloud architecture, and production engineering matter more than a particular framework. Nice to have: - Experience in regulated or externally audited environments. - Experience with cryptographic integrity, including signing, chaining, and verification. - Experience with AI/LLM components in the critical path. - Experience handling technical escalations for enterprise customers. - A previous Staff or Principal Engineer role at a company of a similar stage. Responsibilities - Own core architecture for tenant isolation, data models, distributed processing, correctness, and traceability. - Design systems for high-volume ingestion, processing, search, analytics, and AI workloads. - Own decisions around service boundaries, APIs, storage, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing. - Co-own architecture decision records, ensuring significant choices have written reasoning and more than one signer. - Set technical standards through design reviews and practical examples. - Handle escalations involving production correctness, performance, reliability, and architecture. - Work with Site Reliability Engineers on availability, recovery, observability, and isolation guarantees. - Help tech leads and senior engineers develop their technical judgment. - Prototype difficult technical problems before handing them to a team. - Work alongside the Head of Engineering, owning technical depth, architecture, and correctness while they own direction and the organisation. Job Details Bengaluru, in office. Interview Process - Initial Screening - System Design and Architecture - Hands-on Technical Discussion - Founder and Head of Engineering Discussion Important Note ClanX is a recruitment partner, helping Live2.ai hire a Principal Engineer.