Principal Engineer

About the Role

Credila Financial Services Limited (Formerly known as HDFC Credila Financial Services Limited) is one of India’s largest education loan non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) offering education loans to Indian students. Since inception, Credila has funded 178,000+ Indian students across 63 countries in 4,600 institutes. Credila’s Technology Team manages all payment solutions supporting our education loan ecosystem across India. These solutions are evolving rapidly as we continuously introduce innovative features and launch new products to enhance customer experience. As we move toward being an AI-first company and deeply integrate foundational models, we’re building an AI-native interface to lending that delivers personalized recommendations and timely insights for customers, while improving risk management, scalability, security and accuracy for the business, helping reduce credit and fraud losses and enable more tailored collections strategies. This includes:

• Credit Risk Assessment using Machine Learning for dynamic scoring and fraud detection.
• Predictive Analytics to forecast repayment behaviour and optimize loan approval workflows.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) for automated document verification and customer support.
• AI-powered Chatbots and Virtual Assistants to improve borrower engagement and reduce friction.
• GenAI-based Dispute Resolution and Claim Approvals for faster turnaround and operational efficiency.

Broad roles and responsibilities

• Architect and scale an India wide AI native lending platform disbursing billions of dollars every year.
• Drive modernization through multi-tenant architecture and onboarding simplification.
• Improve automation to 99.5%, SLA to 99.99% and payment accuracy.
• Innovate with GenAI-driven tools to reduce manual dependency across the entire loan management pipeline starting from AI driven bots on website all the way to AI driven reconciliation for finances worth billions of dollars
• Own technical vision for highly scaled backend services, full-stack applications, and agentic tools.
• Partner with multiple CXO-level organizations to deliver cross-functional initiatives.
• Mentor and guide 120+ engineers, raising the bar for operational excellence.
• Ensure platform scalability during peak events and manage tech debt strategically.

Leadership Scope

• Technical Vision: Own architectural decisions for highly scaled distributed systems and full-stack applications.
• Cross-Org Influence: Partner multiple CXO level organizations .
• Mentorship: Act as the most senior engineer for 100 + SDEs , shaping careers and raising engineering standards.
• Operational Bar: Maintain world-class reliability and scalability during peak events.

Required Skills

• Backend: Distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, data streaming.
• Cloud: AWS services, security, compliance.
• Data: Modeling, NoSQL/NewSQL, ML integration.
• Frontend: Full-stack development for customer experience.
• Finance Domain: Payments, invoicing, tax compliance.

Preferred Edge: ML experience, cybersecurity, E2E testing, and familiarity with financial systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or related field.
• Strong architectural and leadership experience in large-scale systems.

Experience

• 15+ years in software engineering with at least 5 years in technical leadership roles.
• Proven experience in designing distribution systems and leading cross-functional projects.
• Exposure to ML/AI-driven solutions and finance domain is a plus.