Principal Engineer
External
Emergence Software · IndiaPrepare for this interview
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About the role
Emergence is a thematic holding company backed by the Pritzker Organization focused exclusively on acquiring and scaling category-defining software businesses. We invest in focused portfolios, specialized operating groups with deep domain expertise and proven playbooks. Emergence combines operational rigor with a growth equity mindset, driving sustainable ARR growth, profitability improvements, and industry-leading customer outcomes. The Mission Set technical standards across a live portfolio of B2B SaaS companies. Own development or technical leadership for critical backend systems, make architectural decisions that compound across multiple businesses, and build engineering cultures that scale.
Responsibilities
- Code, Design and ship distributed systems (async queues, caching layers, pub-sub, background job orchestration) handling production traffic.
- Reduce production incident response time by establishing review discipline, deploying prevention measures, and maintaining team on-call rotation.
- Own technical decisions for 5+ engineers by defining quality gates and architectural direction without delegating accountability.
- Debug and resolve Node.js/TypeScript performance issues in production using instrumentation, flame graphs, and measured improvements.
- Review Python architectural decisions and own automation layer integration boundaries with sufficient depth to catch inefficiencies.
- Build high-output engineering culture by selecting tooling, defining code review standards, and mentoring engineers to ship faster reliably.
Requirements
- 6-10 years production software engineering with measurable outcomes: shipped features, reduced latency, improved reliability, or scaled systems 10x+.
- Deep hands-on Node.js/TypeScript backend experience in production: debugged performance issues, optimized database patterns, shipped measurable improvements.
- Designed and shipped two or more distributed systems handling production load that remain operational without constant firefighting.
- Led a team of 5+ engineers as technical lead for 12+ months: owned code review, delivery quality, architectural direction.
- Owned a critical production incident end-to-end: diagnosed root cause, deployed hotfix, shipped prevention, led post-mortem.
- Communicated architectural trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders: explained cost/latency/complexity implications and made defensible recommendations they understood.
- Python engineering depth sufficient to review architectural decisions and contribute to automation layer integration design discussions.
- Scaled systems from 1k to 100k+ requests per second or single-region to multi-region deployment.
- Track record of reducing technical debt measurably: refactored services, reduced incidents by 50%+, or cut deployment time by 70%+.
- Experience with Kubernetes, containerization, or infrastructure-as-code like Terraform or CloudFormation.
Benefits
Additional Information
Principal Engineer, Backend Systems, Emergence | Remote - India | Full-Time
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