Principal Engineer (Mobile Platform & Backend Systems)

• AlphaSense is moving beyond search with SuperAnalyst: AI-powered workflows that monitor change, update outputs, and surface what matters as situations evolve. Mobile brings that intelligence into the moments when customers are away from their desks
• Delivering those experiences through native applications presents a distinctive engineering challenge: services evolve continuously while released apps remain in customers’ hands. Designing for that reality creates an opportunity to shape how AlphaSense builds shared product capabilities, with benefits reaching well beyond iOS and Android
• Based in Mobile Engineering, you will use a close connection to customer and product needs to shape backend systems across engineering organizations. You will help decide which cross-team problems to tackle and where architectural investment will have the greatest impact, then work with the owning engineers to build and prove the solution in production
• Shape the systems behind product experiences: Set technical direction for client-facing APIs and the backend architecture behind them. Work with service and platform owners to simplify how backend services connect and support product workflows across clients
• Lead across engineering organizations: Work across application, search and AI, and shared platform teams to shape technical priorities around customer and product needs. Represent Mobile with senior engineering leaders, Product, and customers, building agreement on the architecture and investment needed to deliver shared capabilities
• Turn architecture into production systems: Lead delivery of services and subsystems that span team boundaries, from choosing the technical approach to implementing the hardest parts and proving them in production. Design these systems for reuse beyond the initial use case
• Shape shared identity and access: Partner with User Management and platform teams to evolve how users authenticate, maintain sessions, and access product capabilities across Web and Mobile. Build native-client requirements into shared identity and configuration services
• Leave engineers and teams stronger: Help engineers deepen their technical judgment and build the expertise to own and evolve the systems you deliver together. Combine hands-on delivery with coaching and reusable patterns, whether embedding with an existing team or bringing engineers together around a focused mission with leadership support

Benefits

• Work from home opportunities- Your strongest experience should be in backend and platform engineering, with client needs informing your architectural decisions. Prior iOS or Android development experience is not required
• Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgment about business-logic placement, product states, and backward compatibility. Understanding of how mobile lifecycle and network constraints affect backend design
• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models. A track record of simplifying complex architectures with impact across teams or domains
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management, including trust boundaries and the security implications of client-service interactions
• A track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority
• Experience improving customer-visible reliability and performance across client and backend systems, with practical expertise in observability and production validation
• Product and stakeholder leadership that connects technical decisions to customer value. Demonstrated success challenging assumptions and building alignment with senior leaders, balancing immediate customer and product needs with durable foundations other teams can build on
• Strong hands-on engineering experience, with significant personal contributions to production code and system evolution. Ability to develop a deep understanding of unfamiliar codebases and turn investigation into sound engineering decisions
• Experience building production systems for AI-powered search, research, or analysis workflows
• Experience with enterprise identity and managed applications, such as Auth0, Microsoft identity, or MDM/MAM ecosystems
• Experience designing shared configuration or service discovery for multi-tenant platforms and dedicated customer environments
• Experience designing and building event-driven systems, including publish/subscribe or event-streaming architectures such as Kafka