Principal Architect

Job Profile: Principal Architect
Location: Bangalore | Karnataka
Years of Experience: 15 - 18
ABOUT THE TEAM & ROLE:
As a Principal Architect at Swiggy, you’ll own the high-level architecture of the systems that power food/grocery ordering and delivery for millions of consumers every day - across discovery, checkout, pricing/discounting, assortment, and fulfillment. You’ll own all phases of the development lifecycle, from business requirements through design, development, deployment, and production support, while also being the person the org turns to when a Tier-1 system is in trouble at 2am.
You’ll establish the technology vision for your area, demonstrate how to solve deeply complex and ambiguous technical problems, and communicate that vision upward (CTO), inward (peers and the engineering team), and outward (product and business teams).
As a Senior Technical Individual Contributor, you will be responsible for:
Owning end-to-end architecture for multi-tenant ordering, checkout, and fulfillment platforms across Swiggy, scaling to millions of transactions a day with 99.95%+ uptime while allowing new business lines to be launched safely and rapidly.
Owning Tier-1 services serving millions of users daily at 100k+ rps, including being a decisive incident commander for high-severity, cross-team production issues - driving rigorous root-cause analysis and converting fixes into lasting guardrails (regression coverage, safer feature flags, canary practices).
Making and defending cost/performance trade-offs with quantified impact (latency, infra cost, throughput) across the stack, not just backend - you’ll treat consumer-facing performance as an architecture problem.
Building internal developer platforms and tooling (code-quality gates, self-serve environments, data platforms) that raise engineering leverage across teams, in addition to shipping features.
Designing integrations that span organizational or company boundaries under hard external deadlines, balancing user experience against delivery speed.
Guiding how applied ML and GenAI show up in the architecture - ranking, personalization, LLM-based tooling - as a routine part of the roadmap, not a side project.
What qualities do you bring?
15+ years of software engineering and product delivery experience, with deep, hands-on architecture ownership - not purely people management.
Strong internals-level command of distributed systems: message queues (e.g. Kafka), relational and NoSQL databases (query optimizer behavior, indexing strategy, streams), caching (e.g. Redis), and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
A track record of leading incident response for high-severity, high-traffic production outages, with genuine 5-Whys RCA discipline.
Experience designing and shipping internal platforms or tools that scale developer productivity org-wide.
Excellent command of data structures and algorithms; exceptional coding skills in Java or Go.
Comfort operating across the stack - deep in backend/data, credible on frontend and mobile performance.
Working fluency with applied ML/GenAI in production systems.
Experience in high-throughput consumer businesses (food delivery, quick-commerce, fintech, or similar) is a strong plus.
What will you get to do here?
Define and implement a long-term technology vision for Swiggy architecture.
Serve as technical lead on the most demanding, cross-functional projects across the Swiggy organization, including cross-company integrations under real deadline pressure.
Set best practices and technology/tool choices for your team, experimenting with new technologies and measuring yourself on the impact you create.
Own end-to-end architecture, high-level and low-level design of the systems you’re responsible for, including writing code and operating what you ship in production.
Lead the response to and learning from production incidents, shaping how the org prevents the next one.
Who you are?
Beyond technical depth, you think big and move fast without settling for ‘good enough,’ you debate architecture decisions openly but commit fully once a call is made, you stay genuinely curious and humble despite deep expertise, and you’re transparent about risks and incident learnings — always designing for win-win outcomes across consumers, partners, and Swiggy.

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
No