Principal Engineer
About Simplotel:
Simplotel is a Bangalore based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company helping over 3,000 hotels across 26 countries grow their direct business. We are powering e-commerce for some of the largest hotels in India. The name Simplotel comes from a combination of Simple and Hotel - our mission is to Simplify the life of hoteliers through technology. Simplotel is a ‘Shopify for Hotels’, was founded in October 2013 and is funded by Go-MMT - India’s largest Online Travel Agency.
*Simplotel was awarded the best startup in travel & hospitality for 2021 by Startup India, an initiative of the Union Ministry of Commerce & Industry in India.
(https://www.startupindia.gov.in/nsa2021results/travel.html)
Position: Principal Engineer
As a Principal Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping the technical direction of Simplotel's products and platforms. You will solve complex engineering problems, drive architectural decisions, and build scalable systems that power thousands of hotels globally. This is a highly hands-on individual contributor role requiring deep technical expertise, strong system design skills, and the ability to influence engineering excellence across teams.
Responsibilities:
Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and performant backend systems with a strong focus on architecture, maintainability, and operational excellence.
Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from problem definition and system design to implementation, deployment, and optimization.
Drive architectural decisions and establish engineering standards that improve scalability, reliability, security, and developer productivity.
Build and optimize distributed systems, APIs, integrations, and platform capabilities that support business growth and increasing scale.
Lead deep technical investigations, root cause analysis, performance tuning, and system reliability improvements.
Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
Drive integrations with third-party systems such as payment gateways, channel managers, and other external platforms.
Champion engineering best practices through design reviews, code reviews, testing strategies, observability, and modern deployment practices.
Leverage modern AI-powered development tools and engineering workflows to improve productivity, code quality, and development velocity.
Act as a technical leader and subject matter expert, influencing architecture and engineering decisions across teams through technical excellence.
Qualifications
6–10 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale software systems in production environments.
Demonstrated expertise in building and operating large-scale backend systems with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and scalability; exposure to full-stack development is a significant advantage.
Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, performance optimization, and system design trade-offs.
Hands-on experience with Linux, Git, AWS fundamentals, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and production troubleshooting.
Proven ability to design systems for scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and operational efficiency.
Experience working across multiple services, integrations, and complex technical ecosystems.
Strong debugging and problem-solving skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity and solve challenging technical problems.
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, or similar engineering productivity platforms.
Good communication skills with the ability to articulate technical decisions, trade-offs, and architectural recommendations.
Passion for engineering excellence, continuous learning, and building high-quality software at scale.