Principal Software Engineer - Product Platforms
About the Role:
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build shared, API-first product platforms at AlphaSense that power multiple product surfaces, integrations, and agentic workflows.
In this role, you’ll focus on building platforms as products: well-designed APIs, clear contracts, strong reliability guarantees, and a roadmap driven by real product needs. These platforms are consumed by internal product teams, external integrations, including AI agents.
This role sits at the intersection of hands-on engineering and cross-product technical leadership. You’ll stay close to the code while shaping how product platforms are designed, evolved, and adopted across the company. You’ll also work across multiple teams and domains, helping to align long-term technical direction while still owning end-to-end systems. This is not a people-management role, nor is it a purely advisory architecture role. We’re explicitly looking for a Principal who enjoys building, prototyping, iterating, and solving complex problems in production.
What You’ll Do:
Act as a technical owner and force multiplier for API-first architecture across the company
Design, build, and evolve high-scale APIs used by internal teams, external customers, and intelligent agents
Lead the development of agentic workflows, including orchestration, state management, tooling, and integration patterns
Drive API standards, design principles, and best practices through hands-on work and technical reviews
Tackle complex cross-team problems where requirements are ambiguous, and constraints are real
Partner with Product, Platform, and SRE teams to ensure APIs are reliable, observable, secure, and scalable
Identify and reduce systemic technical risks while enabling teams to move faster
Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar through example, not hierarchy
Who you are:
Extensive experience as a senior staff/principal-level software engineer working on applications and backend systems
Experience building product platforms or shared services consumed by multiple product teams
Proven track record of designing, building, and operating APIs at scale
Strong hands-on experience with RESTful APIs
Some experience with GraphQL (design, usage, or operating in production)
Deep understanding of system design, performance, reliability, and evolution over time
Strong bias toward hands-on contribution and ownership of real systems
Ability to influence technical direction across teams through credibility and execution
Nice to have:
Experience building or enabling agentic or AI-driven workflows
Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar agent integration patterns
Experience working in large-scale, distributed systems environments
Exposure to API governance, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility at scale
Experience working closely with the platform and SRE teams