Principal Engineer

About Truemeds

Truemeds is on a mission to make healthcare affordable and accessible to every Indian.

We are building a modern, scalable e-pharmacy platform that powers everything from AI-based personalized medicine recommendations to real-time inventory and fulfilment across the country. As we prepare to scale 10x, we are looking for a Principal Engineer to drive our core platform architecture and long-term technical strategy.

About the Role.

As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of our backend systems while enabling excellence across frontend engineering, DevOps, security, and reliability.

This role requires deep architectural thinking, hands-on engineering expertise, and a strong understanding of the e-commerce and healthcare ecosystems. You will work closely with Engineering, Product, Analytics, Security, and Business teams to build systems that are secure, scalable, reliable, and ready for the next phase of Truemeds’ growth.

Key Responsibilities.

System Design and Backend Leadership

• Architect scalable, resilient, and secure services for critical workflows such as order processing, prescription parsing, pricing, payments, and fulfilment.
• Drive domain-driven and event-driven architecture across distributed systems.
• Lead architecture reviews and guide high-impact technical decisions across engineering teams.

API and Platform Engineering

• Define and enforce API design standards across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL.
• Build internal platforms that enable rapid product development while ensuring service stability.
• Establish best practices for API versioning, schema evolution, backward compatibility, and third-party integrations.

Frontend and Mobile Collaboration

• Align backend services with frontend and mobile requirements to deliver seamless experiences across customer, partner, and pharmacy platforms.
• Collaborate on API contracts, server-side rendering, edge caching, and hydration-friendly APIs to improve application performance.

DevOps and Infrastructure

• Champion CI/CD, observability, containerisation, and infrastructure automation using tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
• Improve deployment velocity while maintaining high availability, traceability, and operational reliability.
• Drive deployment strategies such as blue-green releases, canary deployments, and automated rollbacks.

Application and Cloud Security

• Lead secure system design and integrate security controls throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Implement and strengthen practices around SAST, DAST, IAM, encryption, tokenisation, and secrets management.
• Own security reviews, vulnerability assessments, and incident-response playbooks for critical services and features.

Performance and Reliability

• Optimise backend latency, throughput, availability, and infrastructure utilisation.
• Implement caching, queuing, asynchronous processing, and fault-tolerance mechanisms to improve performance at scale.
• Establish reliability standards and proactively address system bottlenecks and failure scenarios.

Domain Modelling and Business Alignment

• Translate complex healthcare and e-commerce requirements into elegant and maintainable technical systems.
• Partner with Product, Analytics, and Business teams to develop rules engines, business logic, and compliance workflows.
• Ensure that technical decisions remain aligned with customer needs and long-term business priorities.

Mentorship and Technical Leadership

• Mentor senior engineers and engineering leads on system design, debugging, performance, and scalability.
• Strengthen the engineering culture through architecture forums, design reviews, learning sessions, and quality standards.
• Influence technical decision-making across teams without relying solely on direct authority.

Innovation and Strategic Impact

• Lead proofs of concept and technical evaluations for emerging use cases, including Generative AI in medicine substitution and healthcare recommendations.
• Define and steer the long-term technical vision in alignment with Truemeds’ growth strategy.
• Evaluate new technologies and recommend solutions based on scalability, security, cost, and business impact.

What We’re Looking For.

• 8+ years of hands-on backend engineering experience, including 2–3 years in a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or equivalent architecture-focused role.
• Proven experience designing and operating scalable, distributed, production-grade systems.
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, including multithreading, memory management, JVM tuning, and service performance optimisation.
• Familiarity with Go or Node.js will be an added advantage.
• Strong experience with event-driven microservices using platforms such as Kafka or Amazon SQS.
• Experience building idempotent, fault-tolerant, and transactional systems for workflows such as payments, order orchestration, or fulfilment.
• Strong command of data modelling and SQL/NoSQL technologies such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and Redis.
• Sound understanding of query optimisation, indexing strategies, distributed transactions, and eventual versus strong consistency.
• Experience building and maintaining public and internal APIs using REST and/or gRPC.
• Strong understanding of API versioning, schema evolution, backward compatibility, and contract management.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/ECS, and infrastructure automation using Terraform or AWS CDK.
• Familiarity with deployment strategies such as blue-green, canary, automated rollback, and progressive delivery.
• Ability to collaborate with frontend and mobile teams on API design, server-side rendering frameworks such as Next.js, and edge-caching strategies.
• Deep understanding of observability practices across logs, metrics, and distributed traces using tools such as ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Strong knowledge of application and cloud security, including IAM design, network policies, encryption at rest and in transit, tokenisation, and secrets management.
• Experience in e-commerce, healthtech, or other high-scale transactional domains is highly preferred.
• Awareness of healthcare and payment-related compliance frameworks such as ABDM/NDHM, HIPAA-inspired standards, and PCI-DSS.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and lead cross-functional technical decision-making.