Principal Engineer

About Us

At Masabi, we’re driving the fare payment revolution, powering the journeys of millions all over the world. We build fare collection platforms that allow riders to seamlessly buy and present tickets for public transport either on their mobile phones, from a ticket machine, or by even tapping their bank card to travel. Our Justride platform is used in over 250 locations globally, including some of the largest cities in the world. With our industry-first mobile ticketing SDK, we’ve partnered with large players in the transport space, including Uber, Moovit and Transit.

The Role

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join Masabi’s Architecture team. This is a senior role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong judgement and the ability to operate across teams. You’ll help shape the technical direction of Masabi’s platform while staying close enough to the detail to design, review and deliver meaningful technical work. Working across the engineering organisation, you’ll act as a senior technical leader: defining and evolving architecture, guiding complex decisions, and contributing hands-on where it matters most. The role suits someone who can move between system-level thinking and implementation, someone who understands trade-offs, can navigate ambiguity, and helps turn complex or loosely defined problems into clear, practical technical approaches.

Responsibilities

• Shape Masabi’s platform architecture, including platform blueprint definition, standards and best practices
• Design and deliver scalable, robust, cost efficient services aligned with platform blueprint
• Stay hands-on in code and technical delivery, including reviews and targeted contributions
• Identify and work through complex platform challenges related to scalability, performance, resilience and cost
• Act as a senior technical advisor across engineering teams, supporting and influencing technical decisions and ensuring Masabi standards are followed
• Shape and contribute to technical roadmap planning and prioritisation of platform improvements
• Support RFP estimation and technical scoping for complex initiatives
• Produce clear, high-quality technical documentation and architecture artefacts
• Improve how architecture is understood and applied across engineering and the wider business
• Contribute to and help shape technical forums and working groups, including areas such as API and architecture governance

About You

• You bring strong experience designing and evolving distributed systems and microservices architectures
• You’ve operated at Principal or Staff level, shaping technical direction across multiple teams or domains
• You are comfortable staying hands-on, contributing in code, design and delivery when needed
• You have strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and modern infrastructure practices
• You’ve worked on systems where scale, reliability, performance and cost trade-offs matter, and can navigate those decisions thoughtfully
• You have proven experience in data architecture (e.g. data platforms, pipelines, warehousing or data lakes)
• You can take loosely defined (early stage) business or technical problems and turn them into clear, actionable technical approaches
• You communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively, and produce structured documentation that helps both technical and non-technical audiences make decisions
• You’ve contributed to engineering standards, architecture patterns or platform direction
• Interest in or exposure to AI-enabled systems, particularly understanding architectural implications in production

Nice To Have

• Experience with REST API design in complex environments