Principal ML/Systems Engineer

Principal ML/Systems Engineer Architect Track | Hands-on IC | No People Management

The Role You are a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and running large-scale backend and data systems. This role is about architecture, code, and production ownership - not people management.

What You’ll Do Build and operate large scale data pipelines and data lakes (real-time + batch) Design and build high-throughput, low-latency backend systems at scale Architect distributed systems that handle large volumes of data reliably Own production reliability: uptime, failure modes, recovery, on-call readiness Design secure APIs and services (auth, rate limits, isolation, abuse prevention) Make clear architectural trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity Write and review critical-path code Influence engineering quality through design docs and code reviews Build systems that support AI / intelligent workloads as part of the platform

What You Bring Proven experience building backend systems in production at scale Strong systems thinking: throughput, concurrency, failure handling Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed architectures Ability to choose and use the most appropriate language or runtime for the problem at hand, and move fluently between ecosystems as needed Experience with datastores, queues, streams, and storage systems Experience leading or executing system migrations (monolith → services, data migrations, infra or runtime transitions) with minimal downtime and risk Strong instincts around security, observability, and operability Ability to use frontier models effectively to generate the majority of production code, while retaining full ownership of design, correctness, and reliability Calm and effective during P0 / production incidents

How We Work We optimise for deep work and uninterrupted time High ownership Decisions backed by code and production outcomes

How to Apply Show systems you’ve built, scale you’ve handled, and problems you’ve owned. We care about what you built, not titles or years.

About SocialMediaCheck (SMC) SMC automated intelligence layer for modern safeguarding. We build large-scale, real-time systems used for safeguarding and risk detection. Our platforms operate under strict time, scale, and reliability constraints - where missing signals is not acceptable.