Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

AlphaSense

Location

Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland

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 at AlphaSense, you will lead the development of backend systems that support mobile applications, ensuring they meet customer needs and integrate seamlessly with other services. You will work closely with various engineering teams to set technical direction, simplify architectures, and enhance system reliability and performance. This role involves both hands-on engineering and mentoring other engineers to strengthen their technical capabilities.

Benefits

Playing a part in the story of a fast growing company
Interesting career opportunities and training
Relocation support for single employees, couples and families
Flexible working arrangements with a distributed company model
Private healthcare services from Terveystalo
2 weeks of vacation granted up front, and possibility to use vacation days as they accrue

Things to weigh

No salary listed
The role requires leading technical change through influence rather than authority, which may be challenging for some candidates.
Prior iOS or Android development experience is not required, which may limit candidates with a mobile-focused background.
The company has a distributed work model, which may not suit everyone.

Job score3.4/5

Benefits4/5

Freshness4/5

Career value4/5

Role clarity5/5

Pay transparency0/5

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