Principal Software Engineer

About the opportunity

Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating in over 70 countries and driving approximately $50 Billion USD in annual GMV. As more than 90% of this revenue is converted through Discovery-related services, your technical leadership will directly fuel our global business.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for our high-load, Tier-1 Search and Recommendation systems. In this role, you will move beyond maintenance to architecting a new engineering culture centered on Agentic Engineering. You won't just design the next-generation of discovery systems; you will design the autonomous tooling and AI-driven workflows that accelerate our global velocity.

As a key technical leader within Global Discovery, you will provide the architectural backbone for our global Search and Recommendation services powering iconic brands like Glovo, Foodpanda, Talabat, Pedidosya and others. Your focus is on individual technical excellence and acting as a force multiplier for our engineering teams.

• Agentic Engineering Transformation: Guide teams through the shift to an agentic mode of execution, implementing AI-driven development and autonomous operational workflows.

• Self-Healing Systems: Design and implement resilient, Tier-1 services capable of handling massive global traffic with zero-compromise reliability through autonomous, self-healing architectures.

• Zero-to-One Innovation: Lead the technical build of production-grade conversational search interfaces from the ground up, moving from keyword-matching to intent-driven, LLM-powered dialogue.

• Force Multiplier & Upskilling: You will be a fixture in pair and mob programming sessions. Your job is to level up the engineering organization by demonstrating elite coding practices, architectural thinking, and the effective use of AI-tooling in real-time.

• Strategic Influence: You will translate complex business needs into scalable software. You are expected to challenge product requirements and pitch your own technical initiatives that can move the needle on GMV.

• Product Shaping: Collaborate with product stakeholders to challenge and shape requirements, ensuring they translate into extensible and scalable solutions.

What you need to be successful

Architectural Vision & Systems Thinking

• Tier-1 Stewardship: A proven history of owning the architectural integrity of global-scale systems where "down-time" is not an option.

• Simplicity at Scale: The ability to decompose massive, high-concurrency challenges into elegant, extensible distributed systems.

• Future-Proofing: A talent for designing "pluggable" architectures that allow for rapid experimentation without technical debt accumulation.

Radical Accountability & Execution

• Bias for Action: You favor shipping and "figuring it out" over endless planning, moving at an "uncomfortable pace" to deliver value.

• Problem-First Mindset: You focus on the core business need rather than just ticking off tasks, transforming user friction into robust technical solutions.

• Craftsmanship without Compromise: You maintain a relentless commitment to the quality of the craft and reject "quiet compromises" in code or infrastructure.

Engineering Catalyst & Strategic Influence

• Force Multiplier: You thrive in pair and mob programming, naturally leveling up the engineers around you through "lead-by-example" agentic coding.

• Product Shaping: You don't just take orders; you challenge requirements and pitch technical initiatives that directly move the needle on GMV.

• Change Agent: You have the organizational "gravitas" to lead teams through cultural shifts, such as the transition to Agentic Engineering.

Agentic Systems & Workflow Automation

• Agentic Engineering: Demonstrated experience building or implementing systems where LLMs or autonomous agents interact with codebases and infra.

• Workflow Orchestration: Experience automating every aspect of the SDLC, from environment provisioning to automated migration of legacy services.

• Self-Healing Infrastructure (good to have): Experience with chaos engineering and designing "closed-loop" systems that use observability data to make autonomous infrastructure adjustments.

Search, Recommendations & Conversational AI

• High-Concurrency Serving: Expertise in building Tier-1 services in Java or Go that handle millions of requests per second with sub-100ms latency.

• Discovery Systems: Hands-on experience with OpenSearch/ElasticSearch and Vector Search for semantic retrieval.

• Conversational Search (good to have): Experience building production grade conversational systems and transforming keyword search into natural language conversational interfaces.

Discovery Platform Engineering (Zero-Engineering Deployment)

• Self-Service Model Integration: Architect a discovery platform that enables the deployment of new ML models through simple configuration, completely removing the need for manual engineering intervention or ticket-based workflows.

• Infrastructure Abstraction: Design high-level abstractions that decouple model logic from the underlying serving infrastructure, allowing for seamless, autonomous production cycles and rapid experimentation.

• Automated Lifecycle Management: Implement robust, automated validation systems that verify model performance and safety against live traffic before autonomous promotion, ensuring system reliability without human oversight.

Technical Strategy & Communication

• Business Acumen: Ability to sit with Product and Business leaders, understand the business impact of a feature, and propose a technical solution that balances speed-to-market with long-term scalability.