Principal Software Engineer

About the role

You will lead the design and delivery of platform capabilities that power Anaplan's enterprise-scale API gateways, edge routing, and developer acceleration initiatives. You will build and scale high-throughput backend engines responsible for core request orchestration, seamless multi-tenant isolation, and API-first solutions that serve thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of users. You will partner with architects and senior engineers across the Platform Experience domain to set technical direction and align implementation patterns for complex initiatives such as Vanity URLs, JWT authentication flows, and cross-service proxying requirements. You will drive the evolution of our deployment infrastructure, championing modern GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD and Helm alongside highly available containerized orchestration patterns. You will own foundational features end-to-end, from initial design through to production, while continuously improving system observability, implementing intelligent rate-limiting, and solving complex concurrency challenges such as database locks and connection starvation. You will deliver thought leadership and coding excellence across Java and Kotlin, ensuring seamless integration between backend microservices and UI components while resolving complex CORS and distributed edge proxy requirements. You will mentor and elevate engineers across global teams through design reviews, pair programming, and hands-on leadership to foster a resilient, high-performing engineering culture.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead the design, delivery, and architecture of platform capabilities powering Anaplan's enterprise-scale API gateways, edge routing, and developer acceleration.

Build and scale high-throughput backend engines that manage core request orchestration, seamless multi-tenant isolation, and API-first solutions serving thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of users.

Partner with architects and senior engineers across the Platform Experience domain to set technical direction, aligning implementation patterns for complex initiatives (like Vanity URLs, JWT auth flows, and cross-service proxying).

Drive the evolution of our deployment infrastructure, championing modern GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Helm) and highly available containerized orchestration.

Own foundational features end-to-end - from design through to production - while continuously improving system observability, implementing intelligent rate-limiting, and solving complex concurrency challenges (e.g., database locks and connection starvation).

Deliver thought leadership and coding excellence across Java/Kotlin, ensuring seamless integration between backend microservices and UI components (including resolving complex CORS and distributed edge proxy requirements).

Mentor and elevate engineers across global teams through design reviews, pair programming, and hands-on leadership to foster a resilient engineering culture.

Understand, leverage, and integrate modern AI tools and concepts - including agentic programming patterns and LLM-assisted workflows - to accelerate platform engineering and developer velocity.

Demonstrate mastery of distributed systems principles by designing solutions that balance consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in high-load scenarios.

Collaborate closely with product and operations teams to translate business requirements into robust technical specifications and delivery milestones.

Implement and refine CI/CD pipelines to optimize build times, improve test coverage, and reduce deployment risk across critical production paths.

Champion security and compliance best practices across the platform, ensuring authentication, authorization, and data protection mechanisms meet enterprise standards.

Analyze and resolve production incidents using systematic debugging methods, conducting blameless postmortems and driving continuous improvement initiatives.

Contribute to architectural decision records and technical documentation that enable cross-functional alignment and long-term platform scalability.

Requirements

Extensive background in software engineering within enterprise-scale, high-throughput platform or data-centric environments.

Understand, leverage, and integrate modern AI tools and concepts - including agentic programming patterns and LLM-assisted workflows - to accelerate platform engineering and developer velocity.

Deep expertise in backend JVM languages (Java and/or Kotlin) with a strong understanding of distributed systems internals.

Proven track record of delivering API-first infrastructures, API Gateways (e.g., Traefik), and edge routing solutions that guarantee enterprise reliability under sustained traffic loads (2K+ requests per second).

Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerized deployments, and managing complex CI/CD pipelines (strong familiarity with GitOps, ArgoCD, and high-velocity release workflows).

Solid grounding in event-driven architecture, real-time data processing, and managing complex database transaction scopes at scale.

Experience balancing rapid prototyping and fast iteration with long-term sustainability and quality - you have a bias for action and prefer to try and iterate rather than wait for perfect information.

Exceptional technical communicator with a proven ability to align globally distributed teams. You are highly skilled at distilling complex concepts into clear, structured RFCs and architectural designs to build consensus.

Understand, leverage, and integrate modern AI tools and concepts - including agentic programming patterns and LLM-assisted workflows - to accelerate platform engineering and developer velocity.

Demonstrate advanced proficiency in observability practices, implementing structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics to support high-availability platforms.

Have a history of contributing to open source or internal platform foundations that enable other engineering teams to deliver with higher velocity.

Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, dynamic environment where priorities evolve based on customer needs and technical complexity.

Commitment to following established engineering practices while driving improvements through experimentation and feedback.