Principal Software Engineer

About Fleet Management

Our 30-year journey rides on the passion of over 27,000 seafarers and 1,000 onshore professionals. Today, we are one of the largest independent third-party ship management companies managing over 650+ diverse types of vessels.

Headquartered in Hong Kong SAR, China, we operate on a global scale having 27 offices in 12 countries. Our client base spans over 100 world-class ship owners, including Fortune 500 companies from China, Greece, India, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the USA, among others.

Key Roles and Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer, your typical day includes:

Set the Vision: Architecture & Strategy

• Define and evolve the technical architecture for the PARIS ecosystem, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance across services

• Drive technology selection, standardisation, and modernisation across the engineering organisation

• Partner with product and business leaders to align architectural decisions with long-term product and organisational goals

• Lead design reviews and establish best practices for distributed, event-driven, and microservice architectures

• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies, including AI, machine learning, and data analytics, to enhance system intelligence and user experience

Technical Leadership & Innovation

• Mentor and coach senior and mid-level engineers, fostering technical excellence and a culture of ownership

• Serve as the technical authority for large-scale system design, complex problem resolution, and performance optimisation

• Spearhead cross-team initiatives in DevOps, observability, and automation, driving efficiency and resilience

• Champion engineering quality through robust design patterns, testability, and maintainable code structures

• Collaborate with infrastructure and cloud teams to optimise cost, performance, and security

Execution & Delivery

• Oversee delivery by doing design and code reviews regularly and ensuring development cells meets the standards and best practices we have set for the organisation

• Ensure system observability, scalability, and performance through proactive monitoring and architectural improvements

• Lead technical risk assessments, capacity planning, and incident response strategies

• Contribute hands-on to critical development when necessary — setting the bar for technical execution

Job Experience, Functional Knowledge and Qualifications

Indicate the minimum and preferred education and experience for this job and any licenses and certifications required.

Essential - You must have this experience

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2+ years in a technical leadership or principal-level role.

• Proven expertise in full-stack development using modern JavaScript frameworks (React, Node.js, TypeScript) and backend services

• Strong architectural experience in distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and event-driven architectures

• Deep proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including cost optimisation, CI/CD, and deployment best practices, and disaster recovery / high-availability design.

• Strong understanding of relational and non-relational databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB) including backup, replication, and recovery strategies

• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence technical direction across teams

• Strong problem-solving and analytical capabilities in high-scale, secure production environments

• Hands-on knowledge of applying Generative AI understanding in day-to-day software development .

Desirable - It would be great if you also have…

• Experience designing or operating Serverless architectures, Kubernetes, and containerised deployments.

• Exposure to enterprise-grade system design, including high-availability, observability, and fault tolerance.

• Contributions to open-source projects or internal developer platforms.

• Experience in the maritime, logistics, or IoT domains is a strong plus.

• Experience leading Agile development at scale (Scrum or Kanban)