Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer, Backend Systems, Emergence | Remote - India | Full-Time

Who We Are

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• 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.

Nice-to-haves

• 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.

Who you are

You identify gaps in backend architecture without waiting for a roadmap and propose solutions with effort estimates. You've expanded your scope by owning infrastructure problems you didn't have to own, like building a new alerting system or refactoring a critical service. You define technical roadmaps based on business impact and system health. You advocate for better solutions authored by junior engineers when you believe they're superior to yours. You actively transfer knowledge through documentation, workshops, and pairing to reduce single points of failure. You define quality standards other teams adopt, back them with data, and refuse to merge flawed code under deadline pressure. You review architecture with the same rigor as code, catching edge cases in distributed systems and measuring reliability improvements before shipping.

What We Offer

• Remote work fully distributed from India with flexible scheduling

• Professional development budget for conferences, certifications, and learning platforms

• You'll grow your impact by building systems and teams that scale across multiple category-defining businesses in Emergence's portfolio.