Principal Engineer (Agentic AI)

About CleverChain

CleverChain is a growth-stage RegTech company, an award-winning KYB platform recognised by Chartis Research for Best Know Your Business (KYB) and by Datos Insights for Best KYC/KYB Innovation. Our cloud-based platform automates compliance processes, streamlining customer onboarding and risk monitoring for financial institutions, fintechs, payment providers, and any organisation that needs to verify and manage their customers. We are at a pivotal moment of growth and looking to make critical hires that help us get there.

Role Overview

We have recently built a new platform from the ground up, a multi-tenant, multi-region distributed microservices platform that serves as the foundation for all of our products. The platform was purpose-built to remove engineering as the bottleneck in product development: it provides a workflow and agent execution engine, a provider framework, and a tooling layer that allows our product teams to ship new agents, workflows, and products in days or weeks, not months. Because of this, the core engineering focus isn’t building individual product features on repeat. It’s building and maintaining the engine itself, extending its capabilities, expanding its toolsets, and ensuring the platform gives product teams and customers the flexibility they need to build on top of it without waiting for engineering cycles.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join as one of the first hires on this platform. You will work across the full backend, from database schema design and API implementation through to workflow orchestration, AI integrations, and infrastructure. This isn’t maintenance work. It’s building. The platform has genuine depth: multi-region deployments with data residency compliance, a durable workflow execution engine, autonomous AI agents, and a 3-tier database architecture with physical tenant isolation. You will encounter hard problems regularly, and you will have the room to solve them properly. Critically, this is a high-traffic, low-latency, high-availability platform. We are building toward handling millions of requests per day across multiple regions, and non-functional requirements such as scalability, data storage optimisation, latency, availability, and cost optimisation are first-class concerns, not afterthoughts. Every feature you build needs to be designed with these considerations from the start.

We service global financial institutions and are subject to some of the strictest regulatory requirements around data residency, data transfer, and information security. Security isn’t bolted on; it’s a foundational layer. Data isolation, encryption in transit and at rest, GDPR compliance, and jurisdictional data storage and processing are built into the architecture from the ground up, and you will be expected to maintain and extend that standard in everything you build.

What You Will Do

• Build and extend the platform engine — new workflow node types, control flow improvements, human-in-the-loop infrastructure, provider capabilities, and tooling that product teams consume.
• Design for scale and performance — optimise data storage patterns, manage connection pooling across a large number of tenant databases, reduce latency in high concurrency multi-tier data access and in workflow/agent orchestration, and ensure the platform handles high throughput without degradation.
• Build event-driven integrations — services that subscribe to workflow and agent completion events and trigger downstream actions, extending the platform’s reactive capabilities.
• Integrate AI/LLM capabilities — Multi modal, tool calling/MCP, semantic routing, provider management, agent orchestration including A2A, token and cost tracking, streaming patterns.
• Uphold security and compliance standards — tenant data isolation, encryption, access control patterns, credential management, and audit logging in a regulated financial services context.
• Work across the data layer — schema evolution across multiple database tiers, migration tooling, tenant provisioning, query optimisation, and caching strategies.
• Contribute to infrastructure — Terraform modules, Docker builds, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, monitoring and observability.
• Maintain platform quality — comprehensive testing, strict TypeScript, shared library architecture, structured error handling, performance benchmarking.

Who You Are

• End-to-end owner — you take problems from understanding through to deployment and monitoring. You don’t wait to be told what to do next.
• Platform thinker — you understand the difference between building a feature and building a capability. You design with product teams and customers in mind.
• Performance-minded — you instinctively consider how things behave under load. It’s part of how you think, not a box you tick before release.
• Security-conscious — you treat security as a responsibility, not a checklist. You care about getting it right because the data matters.
• Strong communicator — remote work demands clear writing. You’re effective in PRs, documentation, and async conversations.
• Pragmatic about quality — you care about code quality as a tool for moving faster, not as an abstract ideal. You write tests because they help, not because someone told you to.
• Collaborative and open — you bring strong ideas to the table and you’re happy to debate them, but you’re equally comfortable being convinced otherwise.