What you'll own
-
Architectural direction for the backend platform. API contract governance, service boundary design, data architecture, scaling and reliability strategy. Your decisions outlive your tenure.
-
Canonical engineering standards. Author the system design principles, code review norms, testing standards, deployment guidelines, and post-mortem culture that the team operates within.
-
Multi-quarter cross-team architectural initiatives that span 2+ services and 2+ engineers. You define the scope, sequence the work, and follow through to production and post-launch outcomes.
-
System stewardship at scale. Identify refactor candidates, drive debt management, set the modernisation roadmap. When a system in your stewardship area breaks, you drive the response from incident through post-mortem through prevention.
-
Mentoring across the engineering ladder, from junior through Staff. You own the technical growth trajectory of backend engineers. Their progression is traceable to your guidance.
-
Hands-on craft on the hardest problems. You still ship code at exemplary craft level. Code reviews set the discipline's craft ceiling.
-
Hiring contribution for senior engineering. You shape the technical interview rubric and contribute to senior-level hiring decisions.
-
Peer-level partnership with VP Engineering and the founding team on platform strategy, hiring rubric, quarterly OKRs, and fundraising-relevant technical narrative.
What this role will not do
-
Manage backend engineers as direct reports. That is the Engineering Manager scope. The Principal IC and Engineering Manager are deliberate forks in the engineering career ladder; this role is the IC fork.
-
Set company-wide product strategy. That is CEO, founder, and Head of Product scope.
-
Replace the VP of Engineering on company-level engineering strategy or org design.
-
Own Frontend, Mobile, or DevOps as primary remit. You partner across these; you do not lead them.
Requirements
What we're looking for
Must-haves:
-
7+ years of professional backend engineering with Principal IC scope already shipped at a previous role
-
B2B enterprise SaaS at scale: Principal-level work on multi-tenant data, permission models, audit-grade workflows, regulated systems. Consumer-only or single-tenant backgrounds do not qualify.
-
Deep distributed systems, API architecture, and PostgreSQL (or comparable RDBMS at scale) expertise
-
A track record of leading multi-quarter cross-team architectural initiatives that shaped engineering for years afterwards
-
Substantive ownership of platform architecture in a previous role: API contract governance, service boundary decisions, data architecture roadmap
-
Multi-grade mentoring outcomes: engineers explicitly cite you as the reason they grew. Names and grade progressions, not vague descriptions.
-
A history of authoring canonical engineering standards, RFCs, ADRs, or strategy documents that became the operating norm of a team or org
-
Comfortable presenting and defending technical strategy to founders, board, and executives as a peer, not a deferential reporter
-
You have thought clearly about the IC vs Engineering Management trajectory and are choosing IC for this role. A later fork to Mgmt remains an open option; what we need is full investment in IC craft work during your time in this role.
Permanent hard-nos:
-
Cannot articulate written technical strategy at the system or principle level
-
Architectural authority is positional (tenure, title) rather than earned through documented decisions
-
Has not shipped at this scope in the last 3-4 years (architectural skills atrophy)
Strongly preferred:
-
Go or Clojure experience
-
Experience evolving complex existing backends incrementally rather than only greenfield architecture
-
Regulated environment exposure (fintech, life sciences, medical devices, pharma, manufacturing compliance)
What excellent looks like in 12 months
-
Your architectural decisions are referenced in design reviews across the team
-
The mid-level backend engineers you mentored advanced to senior
-
Founders and the VP of Engineering consult you on platform strategy as a matter of course
-
The platform's engineering quality and architectural coherence have visibly risen
-
At least two architectural decisions were made differently (and better) because you were involved
-
Backend engineers write better code and design documents than they did before you joined
Benefits
Why join Unifize
-
Be the technical authority for the backend of a B2B SaaS platform used by regulated manufacturers globally - a domain where correctness, reliability, and traceability matter more than speed alone
-
A board-approved platform rewrite is underway; this role exists because the company recognised that the hardest backend problems need a dedicated, senior technical mind
-
Lead through code quality, architecture, and the standard you set, not through management
-
Own meaningful parts of the platform, not just tickets
-
A team that values engineers who think clearly, write well, and update their views with evidence
About Unifize
At Unifize, we are revolutionising the way life science and manufacturing companies manage processes and communication to innovate. Our eQMS SaaS platform accelerates product development and process innovation in regulated industries.
In a world where changing regulatory environments, market competition, customer demands, and technological advancements are constants, Unifize provides the platform that helps customers move past the constraints that hold progress back.
See our extensive case studies and testimonials and our medical device landing page for what we do and the customers we do it for. Four things customers say make Unifize different:
-
No-code process builder
-
Intuitive, chat-based collaboration
-
Low-code automation
-
Embedded AI
Why this role exists
The board-approved platform rewrite is underway, and the backend needs a single authoritative technical voice to define the standards that the entire backend team will operate within for the next several years. The Engineering Manager search is running in parallel; the EM role explicitly relies on having a Principal Engineer to lean on for architecture decisions. Without this role, the EM either makes architectural calls alone (risky) or escalates every technical decision to the VP of Engineering (not scalable).
We are deliberately hiring this as a Principal IC, not an Engineering Manager. We want the strongest backend technical mind we can find, whose full-time job is making the platform better and raising the bar for everyone else through code, architecture, and standards. Management of engineers belongs to the EM. Architectural authority belongs to you.
