Principal Backend Engineer — Tech Lead What We Do
At UST FinX, we build modern banking transformation platforms that help financial institutions move away from rigid legacy core systems toward flexible, API-first architectures. We enable banks to modernize incrementally, reducing transformation risk while accelerating the delivery of new capabilities.
Our focus is on building a composable integration, orchestration, data, and developer platform layer that connects existing banking systems with new digital capabilities, financial services, operational workflows, and data platforms.
We work at the intersection of software engineering, banking, distributed systems, cloud-native development, platform engineering, and production operations.
Within this environment, we build highly scalable systems supporting real-time integration, workflow orchestration, event-driven processing, data transformation, developer enablement, and operational automation across complex financial ecosystems.
Our engineering organization is globally distributed, with India serving as our primary development hub and engineering pods operating across multiple regions and time zones.
Who We Look For
We are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer — Tech Lead who can raise backend engineering quality across delivery teams through hands-on contribution, strong technical leadership, mentoring, and architectural execution.
This is a senior technical leadership role, not a people-management position.
Your influence will come from the quality of your code, your design judgment, your code reviews, your ability to mentor engineers, and your capacity to help teams deliver well-structured, production-ready backend systems.
You will remain close to the code every day.
You will help teams make sound design decisions, improve implementation quality, review pull requests, solve difficult engineering problems, establish reusable patterns, and maintain a high bar for production readiness.
This role requires excellent Java and Spring/Spring Boot engineering skills, combined with a strong understanding of distributed systems.
You know how to design backend services that operate reliably under real production conditions: latency, concurrency, retries, partial failures, evolving APIs, data consistency challenges, operational incidents, changing business requirements, and sustained production load.
You understand that technical leadership is not achieved through architecture diagrams alone.
It requires working with engineers on the implementation details: API design, domain modelling, testing strategy, transaction boundaries, asynchronous processing, error handling, observability, performance, security, deployment safety, and long-term maintainability.
In an environment increasingly supported by AI-assisted development, you apply strong engineering judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output. AI-assisted code must meet the same standards for correctness, resilience, testability, security, observability, modularity, and maintainability as manually written code.
We value a collaborative, merit-driven engineering culture. Technical leaders are expected to challenge weak designs constructively, help engineers improve, simplify unnecessary complexity, and raise engineering standards through practical execution.
What You Will Do
Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering across one or more delivery teams.
Write production-quality Java and Spring Boot code while guiding engineers through design, implementation, testing, review, and production readiness.
Translate platform architecture and product requirements into well-designed backend services, APIs, asynchronous components, integrations, and reusable engineering patterns.
Review code regularly and use code reviews to improve correctness, maintainability, design quality, testing, observability, security, and engineering discipline.
Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, debugging, refactoring, code reviews, and practical implementation guidance.
Guide teams in designing APIs, asynchronous integrations, event-driven flows, persistence layers, service boundaries, transaction handling, error models, and operational controls.
Help teams solve distributed-systems problems involving consistency, retries, idempotency, concurrency, backpressure, failure isolation, transaction boundaries, resilience, and performance under load.
Define and promote strong testing strategies across backend systems, including unit, integration, contract, component, API, performance, and production validation.
Identify and eliminate weak abstractions, fragile integrations, inappropriate service boundaries, unnecessary complexity, and technical debt that compromises long-term maintainability.
Ensure backend systems are observable, secure, scalable, resilient, diagnosable, deployable, and maintainable.
Work closely with architects, backend engineers, platform engineers, QA, DevOps, product teams, and client-facing delivery teams.
Ensure that delivery speed does not come at the expense of engineering quality.
Build reusable examples, reference implementations, shared engineering patterns, coding guidelines, and technical documentation that raise engineering standards across teams.
Reporting Line and Role Context
This role reports directly to the CTO of UST FinX.
You will operate as one of the CTO's senior technical leaders, creating engineering leverage across the organization while remaining deeply hands-on.
You will influence multiple engineering teams, establish reusable standards, mentor technical leaders, challenge weak designs, and help translate technical direction into production-quality execution.
This is not a passive advisory role and not a traditional people-management position.
Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, execution, and your ability to make other engineers better.
You will work closely with the CTO to establish technical standards, identify engineering gaps, raise implementation quality, create reusable engineering patterns, and ensure that architectural direction is reflected in real code and operational behaviour.
The objective is to act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.
Skills and Experience We Are Looking For
UST is a global digital transformation solutions provider. For more than 20 years, UST has worked side by side with the world’s best companies to make a real impact through transformation. Powered by technology, inspired by people and led by purpose, UST partners with their clients from design to operation. With deep domain expertise and a future-proof philosophy, UST embeds innovation and agility into their clients’ organizations. With over 30,000 employees in 30 countries, UST builds for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process.
