Principal Software Engineer at RELX in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, IN

About Team: 

RX Global aims to create unforgettable experiences for attendees and exhibitors through organizing events. Innovation, creativity, and collaboration drive the company to offer exceptional services to clients. 

About the role: 

The Principal Software Engineer is the senior-most hands-on technical leader for a bounded domain (typically spanning 2–4 delivery teams). This role sets the technical direction, defines and governs domain architecture, and acts as a force multiplier—enabling teams to deliver secure, reliable, maintainable, cost-effective solutions on AWS that meet business outcomes.

The Principal is accountable for the technical health and evolution of the domain: architectural coherence, non-functional requirements, reliability, security posture, and continuous improvement. This role influences across teams without direct authority, building alignment through strong engineering judgement, data-driven decisions, and clear communication.

Serves as a senior source of expertise, is expected to be seen as a “go to” person across the department for a set of technologies. Working collaboratively, will think not only about solving business and technical problems but also about the long term maintenance, risk and cost of change of software solutions.

Requirements:

• Proven experience as a senior technical leader across multiple teams/services within a bounded domain.
• Strong polyglot background (e.g., C#/.NET, Java, JavaScript/Node) and ability to choose fit-for-purpose technologies.
• Experience modernising systems: migrating from legacy architectures to cloud-native patterns, reducing technical debt, and decommissioning safely.
• Experience in systems analysis, design and a solid understanding of development, quality assurance and integration methodologies
• Experience developing integrated solutions within a broad technical and business context of significant impact
• Experience evaluating third-party services and platforms (security, cost, operations, integration complexity).
• Experience leading cross‑team architectural change, platform adoption, or measurable improvements to reliability/cost/performance (with before/after metrics).
• Familiarity with responsible AI usage in engineering workflows (policy/guardrails, data privacy, human‑in‑the‑loop review).
• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science (or related) or equivalent professional experience.

Technical Skills

A person new into role may not have all technical skills but in time is expected to pick up new skills where they exist.

• Expert software design skills: SOLID, DDD, event-driven architecture patterns, modular design, and maintainable codebases.
• Strong engineering judgement in trade-offs: simplicity vs extensibility, performance vs cost, consistency vs availability.
• Distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, retries/backoff, timeouts, circuit breakers, backpressure, eventual consistency, and data partitioning strategies.
• API and event design governance: versioning, schema evolution, backward compatibility, and contract testing.
• Design and delivery of secure, scalable, and resilient AWS-based solutions, including IAM, networking, integration patterns, reliability, and cost optimisation.
• Infrastructure-as-Code and immutable infrastructure concepts; automated environment provisioning.
• Secure architecture patterns & coding practices, threat modelling, and OWASP Top 10 & software supply chain security awareness.
• Strong testing strategy leadership: unit, integration, contract, performance, and security testing.
• TDD/BDD experience where appropriate; ensures testability and measurable coverage of critical paths.
• Observability and SRE principles, including SLIs/SLOs, operational readiness, incident response, and continuous reliability improvement.
• CI/CD pipelines, deployment safety patterns, source control, code review, and automation.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Culture

• Create an environment where teams can do their best work by removing blockers, improving engineering practices, and contributing to a culture of psychological safety and high standards.
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams—especially senior engineers and emerging tech leads—in architecture, systems thinking, and operational excellence.
• Promote strong technical ownership (“you build it, you run it”), including operational readiness and post-incident learning.
• Support scalable knowledge-sharing mechanisms (e.g., tech talks, playbooks, templates, reference implementations).
• Participate in hiring loops and help onboard new engineers into domain patterns and practices.
• Provide hands-on contributions where needed (prototypes, reference implementations, complex refactors, high-risk changes).
• Guide teams in decomposition and sequencing to reduce delivery risk; support estimation/sizing and technical discovery.
• Leads through influence; demonstrates integrity, accountability, and constructive challenge.
• Works with Architects and other Principals to drive technical direction while partnering effectively with Engineering Leads and managers; establishes cross-team mechanisms for collaboration (review forums, design clinics); builds alignment through trust, clarity, and shared goals.

Product & Domain Leadership

• Develop deep understanding of the domain’s business, user journeys, and strategic goals; connect technical choices to measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Co-own the domain technical roadmap (12–24 months) with Product and Engineering leadership: Align investments to business priorities, platform strategy, security posture, reliability targets, and cost optimisation. Identify and sequence technical risk retirement (e.g., legacy decommissioning, resilience gaps, security debt).
• Provide clear options and recommendations on buy vs build, integration patterns, and platform adoption—framing trade-offs in cost, risk, time, and maintainability.
• Contribute to vendor assessments and 3rd-party evaluations (integration, security posture, cost, operational fit).
• Support product delivery teams to simplify complexity, make sound trade-offs, and deliver scalable solutions while minimising risk

Technical Excellence & Innovation

• Sets and maintains a high technical bar across teams; ensures long-term viability and sustainability.
• Own the domain reference architecture and integration patterns across services, APIs, data stores, and events.
• Define domain boundaries (bounded contexts), service responsibilities, and integration patterns to reduce coupling and enable team autonomy.
• Work with other Principals to define, evolve, and govern domain technical standards and cross-functional requirements (security, reliability, observability, performance, compliance).
• Work with Architect and other Principals to establish and maintain lightweight engineering governance: Architecture documentation (e.g., C4-style diagrams)Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and reference implementations. Domain design reviews for critical changes and high-risk systems.
• Create reusable libraries, templates, and frameworks (“golden paths”) that accelerate teams and standardise best practices.
• Ensure solutions are secure by design, fault-tolerant, scalable, and maintainable; validate designs against NFR baselines and technical standards.
• Act as a primary technical point of contact for internal stakeholders (e.g., platform, security, data, operations) and—where relevant—external partners/vendors
• Drive consistency in API design, event schemas, data ownership, and schema evolution strategies
• Establish both data and code quality, test strategy, and review standards across teams; ensure maintainability and long-term sustainability.
• Promote and uphold secure coding standards, privacy-by-design, and compliance expectations in design and implementation.
• Maintain broad industry and company-wide technical knowledge, monitor trends and approaches

Operational Excellence

• Define and drive adoption of SLIs/SLOs and operational dashboards for critical domain services; establish operational readiness expectations, error budgets (where used) and continuous reliability improvement.
• Lead or support major incident response as a technical incident leader; ensure blameless post-mortems and drive systemic fixes to closure.
• Establish reliability and resilience practices: Capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers), and DR validation.
• Reduce operational risk and waste through automation, improved alerting, safer deployments, and toil reduction
• Drive cloud cost optimisation (FinOps mindset) through architectural choices, usage analysis, and scalable patterns.
• Support teams in diagnosing and resolving complex production issues, including performance degradation and failure modes.
• Ensure observability coverage and operational readiness: metrics, logs, tracing, health checks, and meaningful alerting.
• Drive threat modelling and security reviews for domain-critical services; ensure remediation plans are executed.

Why join us?

You’ll have the opportunity to influence how technology is built at scale, and develop leaders who will define our future. If you’re excited by leading product teams, shaping technology, and delivering software that matters, we’d love to hear from you.

Work in a way that works for you 

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals. 

 Working for you 

We know that your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer: 

 Comprehensive Health Insurance: Covers you, your immediate family, and parents.  Enhanced Health Insurance Options: Competitive rates negotiated by the company.  Group Life Insurance: Ensuring financial security for your loved ones.  Group Accident Insurance: Extra protection for accidental death and permanent disablement.  Flexible Working Arrangement: Achieve a harmonious work-life balance.  Employee Assistance Program: Access support for personal and work-related challenges.  Medical Screening: Your well-being is a top priority.  Modern Family Benefits: Maternity, paternity, and adoption support.  Long-Service Awards: Recognizing dedication and commitment.  New Baby Gift: Celebrating the joy of parenthood.  Subsidized Meals in Chennai: Enjoy delicious meals at discounted rates.  Various Paid Time Off: Take time off with Casual Leave, Sick Leave, Privilege Leave, Compassionate Leave, Special Sick Leave, and Gazette Public Holidays. 

About Business: 

RX is a global leader in events and exhibitions, leveraging industry expertise, data, and technology to build businesses for individuals, communities, and organizations. With a presence in 25 countries across 41 industry sectors, RX hosts approximately 350 events annually. RX is committed to creating an inclusive work environment for all our people. RX empowers businesses to thrive by leveraging data-driven insights and digital solutions. RX is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. For more information, visit www.rxglobal.com.

We know your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location.

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