Principal Software Engineer – Data Systems & Algorithms

Impact Analytics is an agentic-first AI software company transforming retail merchandising through cutting-edge AI, LLMs, and Generative AI technologies. As a fast-growing Series D company with deployments across five continents, it is building both industry-leading merchandising solutions and foundational AI agents that are redefining how retail decisions are made. What makes Impact Analytics unique is its combination of deep retail domain expertise, strong innovation culture, and global presence. It is one of the few India-born AI companies recognized globally by organizations like Fortune, Gartner, and the Inc. 5000.

For candidates looking to work on next-generation AI products with global scale and real-world impact, Impact Analytics is an exciting place to build your career. Here’s a link to our website: www.impactanalytics.co.

The impact that you will be making What lands you in this role:

Impact Analytics builds AI-powered, cloud-native products and platforms. As we solve increasingly complex data engineering and distributed systems challenges, we are looking for a Principal Engineer who has deep expertise in data storage, retrieval, advanced algorithms, and scalable data structures to architect the next generation of our platform.

• Design and build highly scalable, low-latency backend systems capable of handling massive datasets.
• Architect storage and retrieval layers for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Solve complex engineering problems involving advanced algorithms, indexing, search, caching, and distributed data systems.
• Drive technical strategy and architectural decisions for core platform components.
• Optimize system performance through efficient data structures, concurrency, memory management, and distributed computing techniques.
• Collaborate with AI/ML, Platform, and Product teams to build data-intensive applications.
• Mentor senior engineers and establish engineering best practices for scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Lead design reviews, technical discussions, and architectural governance across multiple teams.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies to improve platform performance and engineering productivity.
• Architect distributed data platforms that deliver predictable performance at billion-record scale and support mission-critical workloads.
• Design partitioning, sharding, replication, and data lifecycle strategies to ensure scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency.
• Drive architecture for multi-region, highly available systems with strong disaster recovery and fault tolerance.
• Lead performance engineering initiatives across storage, compute, memory, and networking layers to optimize latency and throughput.
• Establish architectural standards for benchmarking, observability, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
• Evaluate and recommend database technologies, storage engines, and distributed computing frameworks based on evolving business needs.
• Drive architectural reviews for complex data-intensive systems and provide technical leadership on critical engineering decisions.

• 12–18+ years of experience architecting and building large-scale backend, distributed systems, or data platforms.
• Strong computer science fundamentals with deep knowledge of algorithms, data structures, complexity analysis, and system design.
• Expertise in designing systems for storing, indexing, querying, retrieving, and processing large-scale structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Deep understanding of database internals, including storage engines, query optimization, indexing strategies, transaction processing, concurrency control, and performance tuning.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including partitioning, sharding, replication, consistency models, fault tolerance, distributed caching, and messaging systems.
• Experience designing highly scalable storage and retrieval systems with predictable latency and high availability.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB, ClickHouse, or similar technologies.
• Hands-on experience designing high-performance backend services using Java, C++, Go, Rust, or similar systems programming languages.
• Experience optimizing large-scale systems through efficient data structures, memory management, concurrency, and distributed computing techniques.
• Experience building cloud-native, highly available, fault-tolerant applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience designing and optimizing high-throughput data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or streaming systems.
• Strong understanding of observability, benchmarking, capacity planning, and production performance analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to drive architecture decisions, influence technical strategy, and lead complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a passion for solving complex engineering challenges.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field from a reputed institution.

• Opportunity to lead large, high-impact projects for global Fortune 500 clients.
• Work in a high-growth startup environment with a flat, collegial culture.
• Best-in-class remuneration and benefits.
• A platform for personal and professional growth with ownership and autonomy.

• Ranked as one of America's Fastest-Growing Companies by Financial Times for five consecutive years: 2020-2024.
• Ranked as one of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies by Inc. 5000 for seven consecutive years: 2018-2024.
• Voted #1 by more than 300 retailers worldwide in the RIS Software LeaderBoard 2024 report.
• Ranked #72 in America’s Most Innovative Companies list in 2023—by Fortune—alongside companies like Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, IBM, etc.
• Forged a strategic partnership with Google to equip retailers with cutting-edge generative AI tools.
• Recognized in multiple Gartner reports, including Market Guides and Hype Cycle, spanning assortments, merchandising, forecasting, algorithmic retailing, and Unified Price, Promotion, and Markdown Optimization Applications.