Principal Data & Backend Engineer
Feeling Ingenious? We can't wait to see what you bring to the team! Apply now!
This is Us
Ingenious Lion is a Digital Tech Hub designed exclusively for Publicis Groupe, one of the world's leading marketing agencies.
As the marketing industry continues to drive digital transformation, Publicis Groupe empowers its clients with innovative data solutions and media ecosystems. Ingenious Lion has one mission: to partner with Publicis' global teams in creating innovative data and digital tech products that will shape the future.
What makes us successful? Two key ingredients: we seek the good and the best, meaning we cultivate a thriving company culture. We're all about creating an environment where people don't just work; they grow, challenge themselves, strive for excellence, and are recognized for their incredible value to the team.
If you're curious to learn more about us, here are four things you should know:
Our company culture is anchored in five powerful values: Joy, Honesty, Connectivity, Own Challenger, and Greater World. Do these values resonate with you?
We are committed to diversity and inclusion because we believe our unique differences make us stronger.
We encourage open communication and create an environment where everyone's voice is heard and every contribution is valued.
Finally, we’re somewhat “obsessed” with quality. We believe in continuous learning and knowledge sharing; when we hit a roadblock, we don’t just complain, we create solutions to overcome it.
In one sentence, we are a group of people with an unusual aptitude for generating great ideas, groundbreaking concepts, and infusing them with positive energy and good fun.
Feeling Ingenious already?
A Sneak Peek at Your Future Role
As a Principal Data & Backend Engineer, you will set the technical direction for OneSuite data products and their integration into the Performics platform. This is a hands-on principal role: you will write code, design cross-repo architecture, lead high-stakes technical decisions, and raise the standards that other engineers use to build reliable, scalable systems.
You will help build the backend and data foundation behind AI-assisted analyst workflows, including agents built with the Claude Agent SDK, turning complex marketing data into dependable services, tools, and agent experiences that can answer questions, surface issues, and support campaign decisions securely across clients.
Working closely with product and data teams, you will own architecture across marketing data pipelines, connector systems, platform APIs, and agent/tool runtimes, ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and built to evolve.
Here Are the Key Tasks You'll Be Working on Every Day
Own backend and data architecture across marketing data pipelines, connector systems, platform APIs, agent/tool runtimes, and downstream product surfaces, defining durable domain boundaries and data contracts between warehouse outputs, platform APIs, agent tools, and user-facing workflows.
Turn ambiguous platform needs into incremental technical plans that balance reliability, security, tenant isolation, developer experience, and long-term maintainability.
Lead the evolution of data pipelines following the medallion architecture, driving data quality, schema enforcement, lineage, and curated outputs for analytics and product use cases.
Harden ingestion from external marketing platforms and related APIs, including connector and reconciliation patterns.
Architect backend services across API paths and cloud infrastructure, shaping how platform capabilities are exposed through stable contracts, streaming workflows, and tool permissions.
Implement secure authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and multi-tenant access controls across services.
Write high-quality, production-ready code and integrate with external APIs, cloud services, and internal microservices.
Build and maintain deployment pipelines and infrastructure environments, implementing tracing, structured logging, metrics, and alerting to ensure reliability, latency, and operational standards.
Mentor engineers, contribute to internal libraries, backend frameworks, and drive consistency across the platform.
We're Thrilled to Have You Consider Joining Our Team. Here Are the Qualifications We're Seeking
At least ten years of experience in backend, data platform, or distributed systems, including ownership across multiple services or teams.
Expertise in Python, API design, service boundaries, async and concurrent systems, SQL, and modern testing practices.
Proficiency with Databricks, PySpark, Lakehouse patterns, and medallion-style data architecture, or equivalent large-scale data pipeline experience.
Strong AWS serverless experience, including Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, IAM, and CloudFormation/SAM or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling.
Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS design, authentication and authorization, tenant-scoped data access, secrets management, and operational security.
Experience designing stable data contracts, CLI/API/MCP contracts, schema evolution patterns, and consumer-facing data models.
Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, or MongoDB.
Strong CI/CD experience and deep knowledge of observability practices including logs, metrics, and traces.
Proven technical leadership through mentoring, architecture decisions, code reviews, trade-off communication, and engineering standards, without relying on direct authority.
Fluent in English, both verbal and written.
Skills That Would Make You Shine Even Brighter!
You have knowledge of AI and LLM systems, agentic workflow integration, and MCP-style tool runtimes (experience with the Claude Agent SDK is a strong plus).
You are familiar with Fivetran, custom connector development, or third-party data ingestion operations.
You had contact with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, data governance, data lineage, and Lakehouse performance optimization.
Knowledge of streaming or queuing systems such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, or SQS.
You are familiar with marketing, advertising, or platform APIs and similar ecosystems.
- Department
- Ingenious Lion
- Locations
- Portugal
- Remote status
- Fully Remote
- Yearly salary
- €77,000 - €84,000
- Employment type
- Full-time