Principal Engineer

Who are we?

MeasureOne is the leading consumer-permissioned data exchange platform, transforming how businesses access and use consumer data — with privacy, consent, and security at the core. Our platform enables organizations to verify and integrate trusted consumer information across domains like income, employment, education, and student enrollment — all powered by advanced automation, AI, and a secure consent-based architecture.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with a global engineering center in India, we are scaling our platform to handle increasingly complex data ecosystems.

What we are looking for

Our platform is built on a distributed, service-oriented architecture involving Core APIs, data ingestion services, parsing pipelines, analytics workflows, and billing systems. As the platform scales, maintaining architectural consistency, reliability, and clarity is critical.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to help us strengthen our system design governance and architectural scalability as we grow. This is a hands-on technical leadership role — designed for someone who can bridge product context, system architecture, and execution depth. This role is not a people-management role. You'll partner directly with the CTO to codify and evolve MeasureOne's architecture across our microservices ecosystem, data pipelines, and API framework. You will design, build, and guide by doing — working deeply within our systems and teams to elevate design quality, scalability, and maintainability.

What you'll be doing

Architecture & Design Governance

- Review and guide architectural decisions across Core API, Parser, data pipelines, analytics, and supporting services - Ensure design consistency, API standards, and data model clarity across services - Establish and maintain lightweight design review practices (design docs, ADRs, RFCs) - Identify architectural risks early and propose pragmatic improvements

Hands-on Technical Contribution

- Read, understand, and review existing Java/Spring Boot/NodeJS codebases - Support engineers with design-level problem solving (not ticket execution) - Participate in complex debugging, refactoring, and system-level improvements when needed

System Understanding & Documentation

- Build a deep understanding of existing system flows and dependencies - Document key architectural decisions, service boundaries, and data flows - Help convert implicit system knowledge into shared, usable documentation

Collaboration

- Work with the CTO/Director-Product on architecture alignment - Collaborate with Engineering Managers to support design quality without disrupting delivery - Partner with Product and QA teams where architecture impacts product behavior or quality

Skills you need to succeed in this role

Core Technical Background

- Strong Experience in back-end product platform engineer in any one programming language (Java/Node.JS) - Experience working with microservices and distributed systems - Solid understanding of REST APIs, service contracts, and integration patterns - Experience designing systems using both relational (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB/Redis) databases - Familiarity with asynchronous workflows, schedulers, or event-based processing

Architecture Mindset

- Has owned or strongly influenced system-level design decisions - Understands trade-offs, not just tools - Comfortable maintaining and improving existing systems (not only greenfield builds) - Experience participating in or leading design reviews or architecture discussions

Working Style & Fit

- Hands-on, detail-oriented, and comfortable reading complex code - Prefers technical ownership over people management - Able to work in a technically deep environment - Pragmatic, collaborative, and low-ego - Willing to invest time to deeply understand the system before proposing changes