Principal Engineer

Who we are Chowdeck is an on-demand delivery service for Africa. We help vendors deliver food, medicine, and groceries seamlessly while also providing customers with a platform to order from their favourite vendors. At Chowdeck, we deeply value growth, excellence, speed, and empathy. Our team is a tight-knit team of creative problem solvers who are smart, kind and committed to helping each other grow. Where you come in We're looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to help shape the technical direction of Chowdeck as we continue to scale our platform, products, infrastructure, and engineering teams. You'll be responsible for driving architecture decisions, improving engineering standards, and building scalable systems that power critical parts of our business across customer ordering, logistics, vendor operations, fulfillment, and internal tooling. Our tech stack consists of NodeJS, MySQL, Redis, AWS, and other technologies. We're looking for someone who is deeply technical, highly collaborative, and excited about solving complex operational and engineering challenges at scale while mentoring and supporting other engineers across the company. In this role, you'll be required to: Lead architecture and technical direction across multiple engineering teams and systems Design and build scalable backend systems, services, and infrastructure Drive improvements in reliability, performance, scalability, and engineering quality Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Operations, and Leadership teams on long-term technical strategy Lead complex technical initiatives across logistics, fulfillment, payments, and platform infrastructure Improve engineering standards, tooling, observability, and development workflows Mentor engineers across different levels and support technical growth across the organization Identify long-term technical risks and proactively propose solutions You're perfect for the role if you: Have 10+ years of backend/software engineering experience Have significant professional experience building and scaling large, highly available distributed systems Have strong experience leading technical architecture and cross-functional engineering initiatives Have deep knowledge of backend systems, databases, APIs, caching, cloud infrastructure, and system design Can make thoughtful technical decisions that balance speed, scalability, reliability, and business impact Can effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders Care deeply about engineering quality, developer experience, and operational excellence Thrive in fast-paced startup environments with evolving challenges and priorities Have a deep and unrelenting focus on customer satisfaction and experience Beyond the paycheck, Chowdeck employees get: Full medical coverage Smart, kind colleagues invested in your growth Housing Assistance Transport Assistance Lunch allowance Chowdeck is an equal-opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We’re committed to providing employees with a work environment that is progressive and open-minded. Our employment philosophy is to hire the best people and empower them to do the best work of their lives. Employment decisions are based on business needs and individual merit without regard to race, color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, marital status, gender, or age.