Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems in London

Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems in London

London Full-Time 63000 - 77000 £ / year (est.) Home office (partial)
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At a Glance

  • Tasks: Lead backend systems for mobile applications and shape technical direction across teams.
  • Company: Join AlphaSense, a leader in AI-driven market intelligence with a diverse and inclusive culture.
  • Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, remote work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
  • Other info: Dynamic environment with a commitment to diversity and career development.
  • Why this job: Make a real impact on innovative AI solutions that empower decision-making for top companies.
  • Qualifications: Expertise in backend engineering and a passion for simplifying complex architectures.

The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.

About AlphaSense:

The world’s most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research content.

The acquisition of Tegus by AlphaSense in 2024 advances our shared mission to empower professionals to make smarter decisions through AI-driven market intelligence. Together, AlphaSense and Tegus will accelerate growth, innovation, and content expansion, with complementary product and content capabilities that enable users to unearth even more comprehensive insights from thousands of content sets. Our platform is trusted by over 6,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with more than 2,000 employees across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland.

About the Team:

Our diverse Product & Engineering team values innovation, collaboration, and the continuous improvement of our platform. We offer a dynamic work environment where employees can grow and thrive while working on cutting-edge technology that shapes the future of AI and search. At AlphaSense, we believe that diverse experiences and perspectives are critical to our success. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where all employees feel valued and empowered to be their authentic selves.

About the Role:

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.

What You'll Do:

  • 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.

What We're Looking For:

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.

Required:

  • 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 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 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.
  • Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management, including trust boundaries and the security implications of client-service interactions.
  • Experience improving customer-visible reliability and performance across client and backend systems, with practical expertise in observability and production validation.
  • A track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority.
  • 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.

Preferred:

  • 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.

AlphaSense is an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals. All employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling AlphaSense’s commitment to equal employment opportunity. AlphaSense does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any other non-merit factor. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at AlphaSense, including recruitment, hiring, training, advancement, and termination.

In addition, it is the policy of AlphaSense to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances where a particular employee works.

Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems in London employer: AlphaSense, Inc.

AlphaSense is an exceptional employer that fosters a dynamic and inclusive work culture, where innovation and collaboration thrive. As a Pre-Sales Consultant in the Financial Services sector, you will have the opportunity to engage with top-tier clients, drive impactful solutions, and contribute to the evolution of AI-driven market intelligence. With a commitment to employee growth and a supportive environment, AlphaSense empowers its team members to excel and make meaningful contributions to the financial industry.

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Contact Details:

AlphaSense, Inc. Recruitment Team

StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫

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We think you need these skills to ace Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems in London

Backend Engineering
Distributed Systems
API Design (REST and GraphQL)
Data Ownership
Failure Recovery
Integration Models
Authentication and Authorization

Some tips for your application 🫡

Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.

Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at AlphaSense, Inc..

Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at AlphaSense, Inc. and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!

Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!

How to prepare for a job interview at AlphaSense, Inc.

Brush Up on Your Coding Skills

For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.

Know Your Tools and Frameworks

Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If AlphaSense, Inc. uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.

Showcase Your Projects

Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.

Prepare for Behavioural Questions

While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.