Principal Software Engineer (Node.js)

At Deimos, we're on a mission to become Africa's number one multi-cloud partner - leading the way in implementation, migration, and modernisation across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Huawei, et al. We combine this with bespoke software engineering services and our own homegrown products (Salus, Patrol, and others in incubation) to help businesses transform, scale, and thrive.

We're an Africa-based team passionate about implementing engineering best practices. We leverage the latest technologies, and build globally competitive solutions for our clients. With Deimos being one of the two moons of Mars, we like to refer to ourselves as 'Martians', who are on a mission to Mars, together.

Our teams value the ability to learn and adapt to technology changes while appreciating solid foundational design and the craft of software engineering. As such, our teams enjoy working with various clients who have different problems to solve. If this sounds like you, you would be an ideal fit for our environment.

Note: You must be based in one of the countries we currently hire in - in Africa or the UK.

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our Professional Services team. You will build software solutions across a multitude of domains, ensuring that each project is done with scalability, maintainability, performance, security, and operational excellence in mind. 

You will be expected to fill the role of a technical lead while providing guidance and mentorship within the team. You will work closely with the Scrum POs, Engineering Managers and Directors to ensure quality across all projects Deimos participates in. You will collaborate with other leads to constantly improve our processes, technologies, and architectures.

This role does not entail managing people directly, but it does entail managing the quality of the work output at Deimos. You will report to a Director of Software Engineering who is on a mission to deliver high-value projects built to the best of our ability.

What will this person be doing:

• End-to-End System Ownership Own the architecture and lifecycle of critical systems—from design through production—ensuring they are scalable, resilient, observable, and operationally efficient. Drive long-term maintainability and reduce technical debt at a system-wide level.

• Cloud-Native & Distributed Systems Engineering Design and build high-scale, distributed services using modern Node.js and TypeScript, with strong emphasis on containerization (Docker), orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), and cloud-native patterns (event-driven, asynchronous processing, fault tolerance).

• Architectural Leadership Across Domains Define and evolve system architecture across multiple teams and services. Lead the decomposition of monolithic systems into well-bounded, loosely coupled microservices aligned to business domains.

• Technical Strategy & Decision Authority Act as a technical authority in the organization—evaluating and introducing frameworks, tools, and engineering practices. Make high-impact decisions balancing trade-offs between scalability, cost, performance, and delivery speed.

• API & Integration Design Design robust, versioned, and well-governed APIs (REST/GraphQL/event-driven), ensuring consistency, performance, and developer usability across internal and external consumers.

• Operational Excellence & Observability Drive best practices around logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting. Ensure systems are production-ready with clear SLOs/SLAs and proactive incident management strategies.

• Engineering Quality & Standards Set the benchmark for code quality, testing strategy (unit, integration, contract, performance), and CI/CD practices. Actively review and guide implementation to maintain high engineering standards.

• Security & Compliance by Design Embed security best practices (authentication, authorization, data protection, secrets management) into system architecture and delivery pipelines.

• Mentorship & Technical Leadership Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, elevate team capability, and act as a force multiplier across squads. Lead through influence rather than authority.

• Cross-Functional & Executive Collaboration Partner with product, business, and executive stakeholders to align technical strategy with business outcomes. Translate complex technical concepts into actionable insights

What key KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities) must this person have:

Experience & Seniority Calibration

• 10+ years in software engineering, with clear evidence of operating at principal level

• Demonstrated impact across multiple teams/systems (not just a single codebase)

• Proven track record of architecting and scaling production systems

Deep Node.js Expertise

• Expert-level, idiomatic proficiency in Node.js and JavaScript/TypeScript

• Strong understanding of the Node.js runtime and event loop, asynchronous and non-blocking programming, performance tuning, and memory management

• Experience designing modular, testable, maintainable services with frameworks such as Express, NestJS, or Fastify

Distributed Systems & Architecture

• Strong experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, and eventual consistency

• Hands-on experience with caching layers (e.g., Redis) and messaging or queueing systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS)

• Proven ability to design for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Deep experience in at least one primary cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) and working knowledge of others

• Strong understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent)

• Experience designing cloud-native architectures (12-factor principles, autoscaling, resilience patterns)

Data Layer Expertise

• Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB)

• Ability to design for performance at scale (indexing strategies, query optimization, data modeling)

System Modernization

• Proven experience decomposing monoliths into scalable distributed systems

• Ability to manage transitional architectures (hybrid monolith + microservices)

Engineering Excellence

• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies (unit, integration, and end-to-end), and DevOps practices

• Deep understanding of observability (metrics, logs, tracing)

Leadership Without Authority

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams

• Strong communication skills—able to align engineers, product, and leadership

What KSAs would be nice for this person to have:

• Domain-Driven Design (DDD): Deep experience applying both strategic and tactical DDD in production environments

  • Multi-Cloud Exposure: Experience working across AWS, Azure, and GCP in different contexts

  • High-Scale Systems: Experience operating systems at significant scale (e.g., high throughput, low latency systems)

  • Community & Thought Leadership: Conference speaking, open-source contributions, or technical blogging

  • Business Alignment: Experience shaping technical roadmaps aligned to measurable business outcomes

About you

For us to achieve our ambitious vision together as a team, It is important for our Martians to lead at all levels, be self starters who take initiative and put their hands up for challenging tasks. A growth mindset is important to us and we encourage all our Martians to openly share knowledge, support and help each other, ask questions, get creative with new technologies and learn from setbacks.

Becoming a Martian means

• Comfortably working and learning from a fully remote, culturally diverse team based predominantly in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana.

• Being an open, honest and respectful communicator.

• You enjoy asking questions, identifying areas of improvement and proposing solutions, no matter your job title or whether you have been with us for a day, a month or years!

• You are comfortable taking initiative and operating independently.

• You thrive in a fast paced environment, where change is constant.

• You find it exciting to work with various clients, from different industries, each with a different problem for you and your team to solve.

• Intentionally sharing tech and industry trends that excite you with your peers.

• Seeking continuous feedback and actively taking steps to continuously grow personally and professionally.

Want to know what you get by joining us?

• Become a member of a team where we value each individual's contribution from day 1 and empower you to make suggestions, get involved and do what you love most!

• Flexibility and the freedom to work remotely.

• Work-life balance where you are not expected to work over weekends or after hours.

• A forward thinking remote company that knows how important it is to stay connected as one team, by providing virtual social platforms for employee engagement.

• A monthly work from home allowance which you can use to set yourself up to work comfortably from home. Whether that is pens, notebooks, new headphones or work snacks!

• A MacBook or Windows laptop for you to do your best work on.

• Become part of a team of exceptionally clever and talented people who like to share their knowledge and learnings.

• We support your career growth and love to celebrate your successes and advancement!