Principal Engineer
How about a job that works for you? 🤔
Ever dreamt of a role where you call the shots on where you work? Welcome to Safeguard Global ! We're all about making work fit your life, not the other way around. 🦸
Our “ work in any way” philosophy means tackling projects from the comfort of your couch, breaking up your day to run errands, or taking meetings from a cozy café in another country. At Safeguard Global , you have the flexibility to balance productivity with life’s moments while meeting your deadlines. 🛣️
How you will make a difference:
We're hiring across multiple teams, and as a Principal Engineer, you'll work across these domains: guiding architecture, influencing design, and unblocking complex problems in areas such as:
- Knowledge Platform
- Client Account Management
- Integrations
- Client analytics
- Time and Attendance
All teams share a common goal: building reliable, scalable systems that power critical business operations for our customers.
This is a fully remote role, working with a distributed team.
How you will make a difference:
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Define and drive the architecture of scalable, event-driven systems on AWS
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Lead the design and evolution of core platform services and distributed systems
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Set technical direction across teams, ensuring consistency and long-term maintainability
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Solve complex, cross-cutting engineering problems (e.g. scaling, data consistency, system resilience)
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Establish best practices for reliability, observability, and performance across the platform
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Design systems that handle high event throughput, failure scenarios, and eventual consistency at scale
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Partner closely with Data Engineering to shape data architecture, pipelines, and platform capabilities
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Influence and improve engineering standards, tooling, and ways of working
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Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical leader across multiple teams
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Contribute to strategic technical decisions and roadmap planning
What will give you an advantage:
We care more about what you can do than ticking every box, but strong candidates will have:
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Significant experience (typically 8-12+ years) building and scaling backend systems in production environments
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Deep expertise in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js preferred) or similar backend ecosystems
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Strong hands-on experience designing distributed systems and event-driven architectures
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Proven experience architecting systems on AWS, particularly serverless (Lambda, EventBridge, S3, API Gateway)
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Track record of leading large-scale technical initiatives or platform transformations
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Deep understanding of reliability patterns (e.g. idempotency, retries, backpressure, fault tolerance)
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Experience operating systems at scale, including observability, monitoring, and incident response
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Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (CDK, Terraform, or similar)
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Solid understanding of data modelling and working with high-volume, data-intensive systems
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Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority
Nice to Have
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Experience with modern data platforms (e.g. dbt, Athena, data lakes)
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Experience in multi-tenant SaaS architectures at scale
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Familiarity with BI and analytics tools (e.g. QuickSight)
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Exposure to frontend technologies (React / Next.js)
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Experience introducing or scaling platform engineering practices
How We Work
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Fully remote, async-friendly, and collaborative
- Small teams with end-to-end ownership
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Strong engineering culture with high autonomy and accountability
- Ship often via CI/CD
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Emphasis on reliability, observability, and real-world impact
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We actively use AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Cursor, ChatGPT) to accelerate delivery and reduce toil
We are hiring this position across multiple countries; compensation varies by hiring location. For target markets located within the European Union (EU), base salaries start from (Gross