Principal Back-end Engineer

**Note from the Hiring Manager -**Clement**

I'm thrilled to welcome a Principal Platform Engineer who will help shape the future of our infrastructure. Our platform is strong and reliable, but we’re entering a new chapter where we’ll rethink how we build, scale, and bring AI into our work.

What makes this team special is our mix of curiosity, pragmatism, and solidarity. We move fast while staying thoughtful about quality and impact.

In this role, you’ll help guide our technical direction and make an immediate difference across engineering. If you care about autonomy, mentorship, and building systems that last, we’d love to meet you.

**TL;DR**:
We’re hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to lead backend and platform architecture, lift reliability and developer velocity, and introduce safe, pragmatic AI to speed delivery and quality for thousands of users.

**About PhantomBuster**:
PhantomBuster is a web automation SaaS that allows businesses to grow faster. We enable thousands of companies to boost their growth by finding and connecting with their ideal customers seamlessly.

Founded in 2016, PhantomBuster developed a toolbox of over 120 flows (Phantoms) to help businesses scale their sales and marketing processes. We allow our users to automate finding and enriching data about their potential customers and leverage that data to connect with them.

**Today, we are quickly moving from a catalog of automation tools to an AI-powered Sales coach product. We need to empower and expand our technical teams to ensure this transformation is seamless, fast, and powerful.**

**About the Role and the Team**:
The Platform team at PhantomBuster is the technical backbone of our SaaS product. We ensure reliability, scalability, developer experience, and performance across our backend and infrastructure.

We run a squad of experienced engineers and tech leads (Joris and Olivier), supported by an Engineering Manager.

We are now hiring a **Principal Platform Engineer (IC5)** to strengthen the team’s technical leadership, provide a senior partner to our most senior Staff Engineers, and champion the thoughtful use of AI in engineering practices.

This role is critical to maintaining continuity, raising technical standards, and guiding long-term architectural direction.

**About the technical stack**:

- We use TypeScript with strict rules
- Node and databases as Redis and PostgreSQL
- Cloud-based architecture on AWS
- DevOps tools such as Docker, Ansible
- CI/CD thanks to GitHub Actions and CircleCI

**What You’ll Do**:
**Architecture & technical excellence**
- Anticipate product and infrastructure needs for growth and reliability
- Set the bar for testing, observability, performance, and security
- Drive code reviews on critical paths, preventing bugs and debt from reaching production

**AI adoption & best practices**
- Champion AI-assisted engineering: from code generation and testing to debugging
- Establish guardrails for safe and effective use of AI (human review, bias detection, security)
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI internally (developer productivity, monitoring, anomaly detection)

**Leadership & mentoring**
- Mentor engineers and tech leads, helping them level up
- Share knowledge through workshops, design sessions, and documentation

**Cross-team collaboration**
- Partner with Product, Frontend, and AI squads to ensure seamless integration and zero-downtime releases
- Lead cross-functional initiatives on reliability, cost optimization, or security

**Reliability & incident management**
- Play a key role in high-impact incidents, post-mortems, and remediation planning
- Drive improvements in SLOs, alerting, and automation for resilience

**Innovation & technical scouting**
- Explore new technologies (cloud, orchestration, AI/ML pipelines)
- Propose POCs to validate technical opportunities

**Who You Are**:
**Experience & seniority**
- 8-12+ years in backend/infrastructure engineering, ideally in SaaS at scale
- Proven track record in a Staff, Principal, or senior technical leadership role
- Experience leading large, distributed, or high-complexity systems

**Technical skills**
- Expert in **TypeScript / Node.js**, PostgreSQL, Redis, and modern caching/queuing systems
- Strong cloud experience (**AWS preferred**), infrastructure-as-code, containers, and CI/CD pipelines
- Solid grounding in **system design, reliability, and security principles**:

- Strong observability skills (metrics, tracing, logging)
- Familiarity with modern AI/ML stacks: vector databases, embeddings, prompt engineering, LLM-based tools

**Soft skills & leadership**
- Exceptional communicator, able to explain complex tradeoffs clearly
- Pragmatic decision-maker balancing speed, quality, and sustainability
- Collaborative, approachable, and proactive in mentoring
- Strong ownership mindset, with the ability to anticipate risks and unblock others

**Nice to have**
- Experience with **AI/ML production systems** (model serving, evaluation