Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential enterprise SaaS organization in their search for a Principal Engineer to shape mobile platform and backend systems. This London-based role sits at the intersection of mobile engineering and distributed systems architecture, where you'll drive technical direction for client-facing APIs and the backend services that power them.

Our client is building AI-powered workflows delivered through native mobile applications, creating distinctive engineering challenges where services evolve continuously while released apps remain in customers' hands. You'll use deep backend expertise and close connection to product needs to shape systems across engineering organizations, working with service and platform owners to simplify how backend services connect and support product workflows.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for client-facing APIs and backend architecture, working with service and platform owners to simplify how backend services connect and support product workflows across clients
• Lead across application, search/AI, and shared platform teams to shape technical priorities around customer and product needs, representing mobile requirements with senior engineering leaders and building agreement on architecture and investment
• Deliver services and subsystems that span team boundaries, from choosing technical approaches to implementing complex components and proving them in production, designing for reuse beyond initial use cases
• Partner with user management and platform teams to evolve authentication, session management, and access capabilities across web and mobile, building native-client requirements into shared identity and configuration services
• Strengthen engineers and teams through hands-on delivery combined with coaching and reusable patterns, whether embedding with existing teams or bringing engineers together around focused missions

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models, with a track record of simplifying complex architectures with cross-team impact
• Strong hands-on engineering experience with significant personal contributions to production code and system evolution, plus ability to develop deep understanding of unfamiliar codebases and turn investigation into sound engineering decisions
• Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgment about business-logic placement, product states, and backward compatibility, plus understanding of how mobile lifecycle and network constraints affect backend design
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management, including trust boundaries and 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
• Track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority
• Product and stakeholder leadership connecting technical decisions to customer value, with demonstrated success challenging assumptions and building alignment with senior leaders while balancing immediate needs with durable foundations

Preferred qualifications:

• 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

Note: Your strongest experience should be in backend and platform engineering, with client needs informing your architectural decisions. Prior iOS or Android development experience is not required.

How We Work With You

Candidates apply through Get A Job.ai, where our talent team will review your background and conduct an initial screening. We'll then submit qualified candidates to our client for consideration. Please do not contact the client directly, as all communication will be coordinated through our recruiting team to ensure the best experience for everyone involved.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed with qualified candidates during the screening process.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to creating an inclusive recruitment process. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and work to ensure fair consideration for every applicant.