Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

AlphaSense

Location

London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom

Posted

13 days ago

Department

Engineering

What they actually want (must-haves)

Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models.
Strong hands-on engineering experience, with significant personal contributions to production code and system evolution.
Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgment about business-logic placement, product states, and backward compatibility.
Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management, including trust boundaries and the security implications of client-service interactions.
Experience improving customer-visible reliability and performance across client and backend systems, with practical expertise in observability and production validation.
A track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority.

Nice to have

Experience building production systems for AI-powered search, research, or analysis workflows.
Experience with enterprise identity and managed applications, such as Auth0, Microsoft identity, or MDM/MAM ecosystems.
Experience designing shared configuration or service discovery for multi-tenant platforms and dedicated customer environments.
Experience designing and building event-driven systems, including publish/subscribe or event-streaming architectures such as Kafka.

What the job really is

As a Principal Engineer in Mobile Platform & Backend Systems at AlphaSense, you will shape backend systems that enhance client-facing applications and lead cross-team technical initiatives. Your role involves setting the technical direction for APIs, simplifying backend service connections, and ensuring robust architecture that meets customer needs. You will also mentor engineers and help them build expertise while delivering impactful solutions in production.

Things to weigh

No salary listed.
The role involves significant cross-team collaboration and influence rather than direct authority, which may require strong interpersonal skills.
Prior iOS or Android experience is not required, which may appeal to candidates focused solely on backend development.

Job score2.6/5

Benefits1/5

Freshness4/5

Career value4/5

Role clarity4/5

Pay transparency0/5

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