Principal, Tech (Middleware)

The D. E. Shaw group is a global investment and technology development firm with more than $90 billion in investment capital as of March 1, 2026, and offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. Since our founding in 1988, our firm has earned an international reputation for successful investing based on innovation, careful risk management, and the quality and depth of our staff. We have a significant presence in the world’s capital markets, investing in a wide range of companies and financial instruments in both developed and developing economies.

We are looking for a senior technologist to join our Messaging Middleware team based in the firm’s offices in Hyderabad, Bengaluru or Gurugram. The team is responsible for building and evolving a framework for real-time data streaming web applications used across the firm. This framework enables partner teams to focus on business logic while relying on a robust shared platform to handle the complexity of real-time messaging, data delivery, scalability, resiliency, observability, and developer ergonomics. As a principal-level individual contributor, you will help shape the technical direction of a core platform, make key architectural and implementation decisions, contribute directly to high-impact systems, and raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, mentorship, and example.

WHAT YOU'LL DO DAY-TO-DAY: In this role, you will design, build, and enhance a framework that powers real-time data streaming web applications across the firm. You will work on capabilities that improve platform efficiency, robustness, scalability, observability, and ease of use for application teams. You will partner closely with framework users to understand their requirements and translate them into reusable platform capabilities that support low-latency, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant application behavior. You will drive performance tuning across the stack, including messaging, serialization, transport, concurrency, backpressure handling, and client/server interactions. You will help design resilient systems that handle failures gracefully, including network interruptions, traffic spikes, and partial service degradation. You will also contribute directly to the implementation of critical components, review architecture and code, troubleshoot production issues, and drive improvements in testing, operability, and long-term design health. As a senior technical leader on the team, you will mentor junior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and day-to-day collaboration. You will influence engineering culture by setting a high bar in technical rigor, ownership, and execution, and periodically providing clear updates to senior stakeholders on technical direction, system health, key deliverables, and important risks or trade-offs.

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR: The ideal candidate should hold-

Basic qualifications:

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline with a strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and object-oriented programming
• The candidate should have 7+ years of software engineering experience building high-performance, real-time distributed systems
• The candidate should have strong experience with messaging middleware, event-driven systems, and low-latency data streaming architectures
• Proven experience designing and building production-grade frameworks, platforms, or shared infrastructure
• The candidate should have strong understanding of performance, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance in distributed systems
• The candidate should have hands-on experience with technologies such as Kafka, Solace, NATS, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming
• The candidate should have strong software design, debugging, testing, and code quality fundamentals
• The candidate should have experience with production observability, monitoring, troubleshooting, and operational support
• The candidate should have demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring experience as a senior individual contributor
• The candidate should have excellent written and oral communication skills
• The candidate should be comfortable working in a language-agnostic environment
• Candidates with experience in browser-facing real-time applications, serialization and wire protocols, resilience patterns, or large-scale performance testing will have an added advantage

Interested candidates can apply through our website: https://www.deshawindia.com/recruit/jobs/Ads/Link/PrncplMiddlewareApr26

We encourage candidates with relevant experience looking to restart their careers after a break to apply for this position. Learn about Recommence, our gender-neutral return-to-work initiative.

The Firm offers excellent benefits, a casual, collegial working environment, and an attractive compensation package. For further information about our recruitment process, including how applicant data will be processed, please visit https://www.deshawindia.com/careers

Members of the D. E. Shaw group do not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of sex, race, colour, caste, creed, religion, pregnancy, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class.