Principal Engineer

About the Role We are looking for a builder — someone who thinks in schemas, reasons in execution plans, and treats a stored procedure like production code. This is not a consulting role, not an advisory role, and not a title-without-scope role. You will own the database-first backend of a transactional platform end to end: schema design, stored procedure engineering, performance tuning, API contracts, and production reliability.

If you have called yourself a database engineer, a backend architect, a platform engineer with deep SQL roots, or a principal engineer who has lived inside PostgreSQL (or a comparable RDBMS) — this role is for you. You will set the engineering standards, mentor the team, and be the last line of defence on correctness and reliability for a data-critical system. This role is based on-site in Kolkata.

We are looking for engineers already here or genuinely committed to relocating. What You Will Own 1. Database Architecture & Schema Design Own the end-to-end schema for a transactional relational system — normalisation, referential integrity, partitioning strategy, and long-term evolvability.

Define and enforce engineering standards for SQL: naming conventions, indexing policies, constraint discipline, and change governance. Establish versioned, sequenced database change management — with rollback strategies and deployment safety gates. Lead design reviews and be the escalation point for complex data modelling and concurrency decisions. 2.

Stored Procedure & Transactional Logic Engineering Design and implement stored procedures and functions that encapsulate core business and transactional logic — not one-offs, but reusable, testable, auditable patterns. Define the standard: parameterisation, input validation, error handling, deterministic outputs, and audit hooks. Build a disciplined test harness for database routines: golden datasets, regression suites, boundary condition coverage, and restore drills.

Own performance engineering for procedure execution: query plan governance, statistics maintenance, concurrency controls, and deadlock prevention. 3. Backend API & Orchestration Layer Build and review backend services that expose database routines via clean, well-contracted APIs — request validation, execution, response mapping, and error modelling. Define runtime resilience patterns: idempotency, retries, timeouts, backpressure, and safe configuration/secrets handling.

Ensure least-privilege database access and enforce security standards across the API surface. Design for pagination, rate limiting, and observable SLAs — not just happy-path correctness. 4. Reliability, Observability & Incident Response Drive backup, restore, and recovery drills.

Define RTO/RPO expectations and verify them — not just document them. Partner with platform/DevOps on monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and incident playbooks. Lead root cause analysis for incidents and degradations; implement durable preventative fixes, not patches.

Build observability into the system from the start: structured logs, correlation IDs, query metrics, and dashboards. Skills & Experience Must Have Advanced SQL- Complex joins, window functions, CTEs, set operations, concurrency control. You write and read execution plans, not just queries.

Stored Procedures / Functions - Deep, hands-on authorship of stored procedures and functions encapsulating real business logic — not wrappers. You own the pattern, not just individual routines. RDBMS Internals- ACID guarantees, isolation levels, locking and deadlock diagnosis, indexing strategies, statistics, and query planner behaviour.

PostgreSQL strongly preferred; other platforms considered for exceptional candidates. Schema & Data Modelling - Designing normalised, evolvable schemas for transactional systems. Constraint discipline, referential integrity, and partitioning strategy.

Backend API Design - Building and reviewing API layers over database routines: error modelling, idempotency, pagination, rate limiting. Language-agnostic — the design matters more than the stack. Technical Leadership - Architecture ownership, engineering standard-setting, mentoring, and pragmatic trade-off reasoning with clear written justification.

Good to Have Experience with a managed relational database service (AWS Aurora/RDS, Azure SQL, Cloud SQL) — operational tuning, not just provisioning. Hands-on use of database change management tooling: Flyway, Liquibase, or equivalent, including stored procedure versioning. Observability discipline: structured logging, correlation ID propagation, metrics, dashboards, and alert tuning.

Experience managing golden dataset suites and expected-result evolution as systems and schemas change over time. Bonus (Not Required) Familiarity with event-driven or serverless patterns that complement database workflows (queues, CDC, outbox pattern). Experience standardising SQL and stored-procedure engineering across teams — templates, linters, performance checklists.

Exposure to security and compliance requirements: audit logs, access segregation, column-level encryption, secrets management. Experience in finance, logistics, compliance, or other domains where data correctness is non-negotiable. Who Should Apply Apply if you are: A principal or staff engineer who has designed and operated a database-centric backend system with genuine end-to-end ownership — not just reviewed others' schemas.

Someone who has written stored procedures or database functions as the primary author for production business logic, and built the testing discipline around them. An engineer who can read a query execution plan, diagnose a locking issue, and explain the trade-off between a partial index and a covering index — without looking it up. A technical leader who has set engineering standards, run design reviews, and mentored engineers — not just contributed individually.

Based in Kolkata, or ready to relocate here. On-site, full-time. We want people who are committed to being in the room.

This is not the right role if: Your SQL expertise is primarily application-layer ORM usage with limited direct schema or stored-procedure ownership. You have not been the primary architect on a production transactional database system — as opposed to a contributor or reviewer. Your backend experience is predominantly stateless microservices with thin database layers and no performance or reliability ownership.

You are open to Kolkata but not actively committed — we are not the right fit for a tentative relocation. Experience & Qualifications 10–15+ years of overall engineering experience with a demonstrable record of principal-level impact. Strong Python scripting is mandatory — you will be assessed on actual code during the interview process.

Expert-level SQL — you will be assessed on actual query writing, schema design, and execution plan analysis during the interview process. B.E. / B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science, IT, or equivalent practical experience. Based in Kolkata or willing to relocate.

This role is on-site, full-time.