Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Lead the design, evolution, and reliability of AlphaSense’s global financial data extraction and normalization platform. You will own the architecture of a large-scale system and act as a technical authority for critical components.

Key missions

• Lead architecture and evolution of the platform, ensuring high reliability and scalability.
• Minimize human-in-the-loop validation using strategies such as:
  • AI-based validation
  • Confidence scoring
  • Provenance/provenance tracking
  • Deterministic safeguards

Responsibilities

• Own system architecture and drive iterative hardening of production systems.
• Shape approaches to data ingestion/extraction/processing at scale.
• Provide technical leadership across teams (without formal people management).
• Drive improvements to reliability, observability, and failure-mode handling.
• Contribute to trustworthy systems that combine probabilistic (AI) and deterministic logic.

Requirements

• 15+ years building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Experience with document understanding, NLP, and/or financial data extraction.
• Experience building provenance/lineage and/or confidence-scoring systems.
• Demonstrated ability to reduce operational/human overhead via better system design.
• Strong expertise in one or more of:
  • Platform/infrastructure engineering
  • Distributed systems and data platforms/pipelines
  • Reliability engineering (observability, failure modes, iterative hardening)
• Track record of technical leadership across teams without formal management.

Nice to have

• Experience shaping internal platforms used by multiple teams.
• AI/ML-powered extraction or classification systems.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and modern data stacks.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving clarity.