Principal, Tech (Middleware)

DE Shaw India · Bengaluru · 7+ yrs experience · Posted 2026-01-12

Tech stack: Kafka

Apply on the company site · Get a referral for this role

DE Shaw India salary & ratings · DE Shaw India interview process · More live openings

About the role

We are looking for a senior technologist to join our Messaging Middleware team based in the firm’s offices in Hyderabad, Bengaluru or Gurugram. The team is responsible for building and evolving a framework for real-time data streaming web applications used across the firm. This framework enables partner teams to focus on business logic while relying on a robust shared platform to handle the complexity of real-time messaging, data delivery, scalability, resiliency, observability, and developer ergonomics. As a principal-level individual contributor, you will help shape the technical direction of a core platform, make key architectural and implementation decisions, contribute directly to high-impact systems, and raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, mentorship, and example.

Responsibilities:
- In this role, you will design, build, and enhance a framework that powers real-time data streaming web applications across the firm.
- You will work on capabilities that improve platform efficiency, robustness, scalability, observability, and ease of use for application teams.
- You will partner closely with framework users to understand their requirements and translate them into reusable platform capabilities that support low-latency, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant application behavior.
- You will drive performance tuning across the stack, including messaging, serialization, transport, concurrency, backpressure handling, and client/server interactions.
- You will help design resilient systems that handle failures gracefully, including network interruptions, traffic spikes, and partial service degradation.
- You will also contribute directly to the implementation of critical components, review architecture and code, troubleshoot production issues, and drive improvements in testing, operability, and long-term design health.
- As a senior technical leader on the team, you will mentor junior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and day-to-day collaboration.
- You will influence engineering culture by setting a high bar in technical rigor, ownership, and execution, and periodically providing clear updates to senior stakeholders on technical direction, system health, key deliverables, and important risks or trade-offs.

Qualifications:
- A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline with excellent foundation in algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and object-oriented programming
- More than 7 years of software engineering experience building high-performance, real-time distributed systems
- Extensive experience with messaging middleware, event-driven systems, and low-latency data streaming architecture
- Proven experience designing and building production-grade frameworks, platforms, or shared infrastructure
- Exceptional understanding of performance, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance in distributed systems
- Hands-on experience with technologies such as Kafka, Solace, NATS, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming
- Robust software design, debugging, testing, and code quality fundamentals
- Experience with production observability, monitoring, troubleshooting, and operational support
- The ability to demonstrate technical leadership and mentoring experience as a senior individual contributor
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- A comfort level with working in a language-agnostic environment
- Experience in browser-facing real-time applications, serialization and wire protocols, resilience patterns, or large-scale performance testing

Qualifications

- A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline with excellent foundation in algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and object-oriented programming
- More than 7 years of software engineering experience building high-performance, real-time distributed systems
- Extensive experience with messaging middleware, event-driven systems, and low-latency data streaming architecture
- Proven experience designing and building production-grade frameworks, platforms, or shared infrastructure
- Exceptional understanding of performance, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance in distributed systems
- Hands-on experience with technologies such as Kafka, Solace, NATS, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming
- Robust software design, debugging, testing, and code quality fundamentals
- Experience with production observability, monitoring, troubleshooting, and operational support
- The ability to demonstrate technical leadership and mentoring experience as a senior individual contributor
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- A comfort level with working in a language-agnostic environment
- Experience in browser-facing real-time applications, serialization and wire protocols, resilience patterns, or large-scale performance testing

Responsibilities

- In this role, you will design, build, and enhance a framework that powers real-time data streaming web applications across the firm.
- You will work on capabilities that improve platform efficiency, robustness, scalability, observability, and ease of use for application teams.
- You will partner closely with framework users to understand their requirements and translate them into reusable platform capabilities that support low-latency, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant application behavior.
- You will drive performance tuning across the stack, including messaging, serialization, transport, concurrency, backpressure handling, and client/server interactions.
- You will help design resilient systems that handle failures gracefully, including network interruptions, traffic spikes, and partial service degradation.
- You will also contribute directly to the implementation of critical components, review architecture and code, troubleshoot production issues, and drive improvements in testing, operability, and long-term design health.
- As a senior technical leader on the team, you will mentor junior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and day-to-day collaboration.
- You will influence engineering culture by setting a high bar in technical rigor, ownership, and execution, and periodically providing clear updates to senior stakeholders on technical direction, system health, key deliverables, and important risks or trade-offs.

More openings at DE Shaw India