Principal Software Engineer
Engineering • Hyderabad, India •Full-Time
ABOUT KEKA
Keka HR is redefining how businesses across the globe manage their most valuable asset — their people. With over 10,000 companies trusting our platform and a product that has earned one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the HR technology space, we are at an inflection point. We need engineers who don’t just write code — they architect the future.
As a Principal Software Engineer at Keka, you won’t be joining a company — you’ll be shaping one. This is a rare opportunity to operate at the intersection of deep technical complexity and massive business impact.
WHY KEKA
- Greenfield at Scale: Build and own foundational systems from the ground up — multi-tenant architecture, distributed workflows, real-time event-driven pipelines — while serving millions of end-users across global enterprises.
- Technical Depth, Not Just Breadth: You’ll tackle problems that demand mastery of distributed systems theory, not just framework knowledge. Think consensus protocols, CQRS at scale, eventually consistent data models, and zero-downtime migrations across continents.
- Founder-Led, Engineer-First Culture: Keka was built by engineers who believe great software changes industries. Technical excellence isn’t a talking point here — it’s how decisions are made. You’ll have direct access to leadership and the mandate to drive architectural decisions.
- Hyper-Growth with Enterprise DNA: We combine the speed and ambition of a high-growth startup with the engineering rigour required to serve Fortune 500 companies. You get the best of both worlds — move fast and build things that last.
- Impact at a Category-Defining Moment: Keka is building the operating system for the modern workforce. The systems you architect today will underpin how millions of people experience work. This is a once-in-a-career platform play.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
This is not a role where you execute on someone else’s architecture. You will define the technical direction for critical platform domains and be the engineer other engineers look to for the hardest problems.
- Architect and evolve Keka’s distributed platform to handle 10x growth — designing for multi-region deployments, horizontal scalability, and sub-second latencies across complex HR workflows.
- Own the technical strategy for one or more platform pillars, and translate ambiguous business needs into elegant, scalable system designs.
- Design and implement event-driven architectures, distributed data pipelines, and fault-tolerant microservice topologies that can operate reliably at enterprise scale with stringent SLA requirements.
- Establish and champion engineering standards across the organisation — from API design contracts and observability frameworks to CI/CD maturity models and production readiness reviews.
- Drive cross-team technical alignment on platform-wide concerns: service mesh strategy, data consistency models, schema evolution, backward compatibility, and API versioning.
- Mentor and elevate senior engineers, conducting architecture reviews, leading design forums, and building a culture of technical rigour, intellectual curiosity, and pragmatic innovation.
- Partner with Product, Security, and Infrastructure leadership to define the technology roadmap and make high-stakes build-vs-buy decisions with long-term architectural integrity in mind.
Be a hands-on technical leader — you will write production code, review critical pull requests, debug production incidents, and prototype new approaches alongside your team.
TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES REQUIRED
Distributed Systems Design - Strong hands-on experience building highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems. Solid understanding of CAP trade-offs, consensus (Raft/Paxos), distributed transactions (Saga/2PC), and eventual consistency at scale.
System Architecture - Proven ability to design scalable microservices architectures, decompose monoliths, and apply DDD, CQRS, and event-driven patterns in enterprise environments.
Data Engineering at Scale - Experience building large-scale data platforms, real-time streaming systems (e.g., Kafka), and leveraging diverse storage solutions (relational, NoSQL, columnar).
Performance & Reliability - Expertise in SLO-driven engineering, observability, capacity planning, and operating systems with 99.99%+ availability. Skilled in diagnosing latency and reliability issues.
Cloud & Infrastructure - Strong knowledge of cloud-native architectures, containers, orchestration, IaC, and multi-region deployments across major cloud providers.
Security & Compliance - Understanding of zero-trust principles, encryption standards, access control models (RBAC/ABAC), and compliance frameworks (SOC2, GDPR, ISO 27001).
API & Platform Engineering - Experience designing scalable, versioned APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and platform capabilities for internal and external consumers.
Technical Leadership - Ability to drive architectural decisions, author design docs/RFCs, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction across teams.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of professional experience building and operating distributed systems at scale in production environments serving millions of users.
- A polyglot engineer who thinks in systems, not languages. You’re equally comfortable reasoning about a JVM-based service, a Go microservice, or a Python data pipeline — and you choose the right tool for the problem.
- Blended experience across hyper-scale startups and enterprise-grade companies — you understand the urgency and resourcefulness of a startup and the discipline and process rigour of a large-scale enterprise.
- A track record of leading architecture for systems processing millions of events/day, with hands-on experience in event-driven architectures, distributed messaging, and stream processing.
- Strong computer science fundamentals — algorithms, data structures, concurrency models, networking, and operating systems concepts aren’t trivia to you; they’re tools you use daily.
- Experience with production observability stacks (distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics pipelines) and the discipline to instrument systems for debuggability from day one.
- B.Tech/M.Tech/MS in Computer Science or equivalent depth acquired through years of deliberate practice and system-building at the highest level.
WHAT SETS YOU APART
- You’ve led zero-to-one platform initiatives — building foundational infrastructure that became the backbone of a product or company.
- Published work, open-source contributions, or conference talks on distributed systems, database internals, or platform engineering.
- Experience in multi-tenant SaaS architecture, particularly in regulated domains like HR, fintech, or healthcare.
- You’ve built and scaled engineering teams as a force multiplier — through mentorship, design reviews, and cultivating a culture of excellence.
JOIN US
The best engineers don’t just look for a job — they look for a problem worth solving and a team capable of solving it. At Keka, you’ll find both. We are building the infrastructure that will power how the modern workforce operates, and we need someone who thinks in decades, not sprints.
If you’ve spent your career building systems that millions depend on, and you’re ready for the challenge of doing it at a company where your work will define the platform — we want to talk to you.
Keka HR — From System of Record to System of Intelligence. Leading the AI Transformation in HR.
