role = \"PRINCIPAL ENGINEER\" if raises_bar(team) and depth >= LEGENDARY and ships_code else \"SENIOR\" in London

Let’s decode this. We're not looking for someone who has "been around for 10+ years". We're looking for someone who has raised the bar for ten years.

• raises_bar(team) → The people around you write better code because you are there. You mentor through pairing and feedback, not hierarchy.
• depth >= LEGENDARY → You have gone deep enough to hold strong opinions, and humble enough to change them.
• ships_code → You still build. Regularly. In production.

This role isn’t for everyone. It’s for engineers who want to stay close to the code, go deep, and do meaningful work. If that sounds like you - Apply.

What the work looks like: We can't promise which problem you'll pick up, but the menu right now looks something like this:

• Redesign a ClickHouse schema so an ad buyer can query 85 billion rows in under two seconds, and discover that pre-exploding the rows 168x is actually the right answer.
• Keep a vehicle telemetry platform moving billions of messages a day without the Kafka consumers falling over.
• Build the engineering spine of a mobile wallet used by more than two billion people across four continents.
• Ship the data product behind peer-review submissions for one of the world's largest scientific publishers.

The list changes every quarter. The pattern doesn't: data-heavy, distributed, and often sitting on top of something that already exists and isn't perfect.

What you will actually do:

• Design and build systems that deal with real-world complexity (not toy problems).
• Write production code frequently, not just review or direct.
• Work across languages when needed, not just your comfort zone.
• Break down messy problems into clean, maintainable systems.
• Push back on bad ideas, including ours.

You won’t be:

• A people manager.
• A “review-only” architect.
• Someone removed from the code.

How we think about engineering:

• We care about code that is simple, testable, and built to change.
• Engineers who can explain their design decisions clearly.
• TDD, refactoring, and continuous improvement - not as rituals, but as tools.
• Choosing the right technology, not the fashionable one.

We don’t care much about:

• Buzzwords.
• Framework loyalty.
• Whether you’ve used our exact stack before.

Tech (context, not a checklist): TypeScript, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Go, Elixir, Python, .NET, Node.js, Rust. You don't need to have shipped all of these. You do need the ability to learn what the problem demands.

What you’ll get:

• A place where Principal Engineers still write code - daily.
• One designation across the company: Solution Consultant. "Principal Engineer" is the translation for the outside world.
• Small teams, high ownership, large impact, minimal process overhead.
• No reporting managers. Decisions happen where the code does.
• Find your balance between work and life’s ups and downs with unlimited leave when you really need it.
• Open salaries. Inside Sahaj, every Sahajeevi can see every other Sahajeevi's pay, including the founders'. The annual hike is voted on collectively in a room where the whole company reads the P&L.
• Own what you build. When Sahaj grows in impact and value, you’ll have a share in that upside.