Principal Engineer (Data and Infra)

About Exotel

Exotel is one of Asias largest and most trusted customer engagement platforms. From Voice and SMS to WhatsApp and AI-led contact centre intelligence Exotel enables enterprises to deliver secure scalable and seamless customer conversations. Trusted by thousands of businesses across BFSI Logistics E-commerce Healthcare and more Exotel processes billions of interactions every year.

Our mission is to power meaningful conversations through robust engineering customer-centric design and intelligent automation.

Platform Engineering @ Exotel

The Platform Engineering team builds and operates the core distributed systems and data infrastructure that power Exotels products. The team focuses on reliability scalability performance and security abstracting complex infrastructure and data challenges to enable faster innovation across product teams.

Role Overview

As a Platform Engineer PE-1 (Data & Infrastructure) you will be responsible for designing building and operating scalable data systems and infrastructure components that support Exotels high-throughput low-latency platforms. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with strong ownership where you will work closely with senior engineers and tech leads on distributed systems data pipelines and platform reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Design develop and maintain scalable data infrastructure including data pipelines storage systems and data access layers.
  
  

• Build and operate distributed systems that ensure high availability fault tolerance and low latency.
  
  

• Work with databases and messaging systems to support real-time and batch workloads.
  
  

• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on data modelling system design and performance optimisation.
  
  

• Implement monitoring alerting and logging to ensure platform reliability and SLA adherence.
  
  

• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues across data and infrastructure layers.
  
  

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines deployment automation and infrastructure improvements.
  
  

• Participate in design reviews code reviews and on-call rotations.
  
  

• Continuously improve system scalability security and cost efficiency.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 69 years of hands-on experience in backend data or platform engineering roles.
  
  

• Strong experience building and operating data systems such as:
  
  

• Data pipelines
  
  

• Data APIs
  
  

• Reporting or analytics frameworks
  
  

• Experience with distributed databases and data stores such as MySQL Redis Elasticsearch Aerospike or similar systems.
  
  

• Working knowledge of messaging and streaming systems (e.g. Kafka or equivalent).
  
  

• Proficiency in at least one systems programming language such as Java or Go.
  
  

• Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes (EKS preferred).
  
  

• Familiarity with observability and DevOps tooling such as Prometheus Grafana ELK Jenkins.
  
  

• Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals: data structures algorithms and distributed systems concepts.
  
  

• Ownership mindset with a strong focus on production quality and reliability.
  
  

Good-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS GCP or Azure.
  
  

• Exposure to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform Ansible etc.).
  
  

• Experience operating production-scale distributed systems.
  
  

• Familiarity with AI/ML data pipelines or real-time analytics systems.
  
  

• Exposure to serverless technologies or workflow/orchestration engines.
  
  

• Understanding of cost optimisation and capacity planning in cloud environments.