Principal Engineer

Location: Abu Dhabi

Duration: Permanent

Package: 55,000 AED – 60,000 AED per month plus benefits

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to take a hands-on role in the architecture, design, and development of our clients core trading platform. You will be instrumental in driving engineering excellence, mentoring team members, and influencing technical strategy across the organisation. This is a highly impactful role for someone with deep technical skills in Node.js, Golang, and ReactJS, coupled with experience building and scaling real-time trading systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and development of mission-critical backend and frontend components in a high-throughput, low-latency trading environment.
• Drive strategic technical decisions and guide the evolution of the platform architecture.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and other cross-functional teams to deliver secure and reliable features.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices, including CI/CD, testing, observability, and code quality.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and career growth.
• Own system performance and scalability—analyze bottlenecks and implement optimisations.
• Contribute to incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability engineering efforts.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a principal or staff-level role.
• Strong expertise in Node.js and Golang for backend services.
• Proven experience building modern web applications using ReactJS.
• Demonstrated experience in building high-performance trading platforms or financial systems (e.g., order matching engines, market data feeds, execution gateways).
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, real-time messaging, and fault-tolerant architecture.
• Solid foundation in software architecture, design patterns, and data modeling.
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with FIX protocol, WebSockets, or other trading-related APIs.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and stream processing frameworks.
• Contributions to open-source projects or active involvement in developer communities.
• Background in security and compliance for fintech applications.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Helm).