Principal Software Engineer / Staff

• 11 July 2026 • 100% • Indefinite duration • Lausanne Principal Software Engineer / Staff • Full time • Department: AI Agents • Department: AI Agents • Division: Engineering Company Description Nexthink is the leader in employee digital experience management software. The company provides IT managers with unprecedented visibility allowing them to see, diagnose, and resolve large-scale issues affecting employees everywhere, with any application or network, before employees notice the problem. As the first solution enabling IT to move from reactive problem resolution to proactive optimization, Nexthink enables more than 1,300 customers to offer better digital experiences to more than 18 million employees. With headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Boston, Massachusetts, Nexthink has 9 offices worldwide. LI-Hybrid # Job Description We are looking for a backend principal software engineer / staff to lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of our large-scale AI chat agent platform. This system is designed to support more than 20 million users worldwide, making it one of the most ambitious backend initiatives at Nexthink. As a principal / staff engineer, you will go beyond implementation: you will define technical direction, influence cross-team design decisions, and serve as a trusted advisor to both technical and product leadership. You will tackle issues of scale, reliability, and performance while collaborating with AI/ML, infrastructure, and security teams to build production-ready AI experiences. This is a high-impact, high-responsibility role where you will be tasked with making fundamental architectural decisions and mentoring senior engineers, ensuring that Nexthink's AI systems are designed to evolve with the future. Responsibilities Define and drive the technical vision and architectural strategy of the AI chat backend platform. Lead the design of highly scalable, low-latency distributed systems supporting more than 20 million global users. Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align engineering strategy with business objectives. Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, influencing design patterns, coding standards, and best practices. Architect and deliver fault-tolerant APIs and services capable of handling large-scale real-time workloads. Promote observability, performance, and resilience across the stack. Act as a mentor and multiplier, raising the technical bar and helping senior engineers progress. Lead technical deep dives, design reviews, and roadmap alignment discussions with leadership. Ensure that security, compliance, and cost efficiency are integrated by design. Qualifications More than 10 years of experience in backend engineering, including more than 3 years in staff or principal level roles. Proven success in designing and scaling backend systems for tens of millions of users or high-throughput real-time systems. Expertise in Java (17+), Python, or Node.js, with solid experience in distributed systems, concurrency, and high availability. Hands-on skills in cloud-native architectures (AWS or equivalent), Kubernetes/ECS, and containerized deployments. Significant experience in building and operating critical services with SLAs in production. Deep understanding of API design, streaming data, and event-driven systems. Excellent communication skills - capable of influencing cross-functional teams and leadership with clear technical orientation. Track record of mentoring and elevating engineering teams. Assets (differentiators) Deep knowledge of Java frameworks (Spring Boot, Micronaut). Advanced expertise in streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, Spark). Experience in putting LLM-powered systems into production (RAG, fine-tuning, observability, evaluation frameworks). Previous experience managing multi-region or global-scale deployments. Knowledge of performance optimization, latency reduction, and cost scaling at a global scale. Familiarity with GitOps, Terraform, CI/CD, and platform engineering practices. Experience building enterprise chat or messaging systems. Good understanding of data security, compliance, and regulatory frameworks (SOC2, ISO, GDPR). Additional Information We are the pioneers and scouts of a global IT market category (DEX) that is shaping the future of work in the world, providing our customers' IT teams with total digital visibility across their enterprise. Our innovative solutions integrate real-time analytics, automation, and employee feedback across all access points. This enables our IT teams to solve complex technical challenges, create increasingly productive work environments, and provide happy and satisfied employees in the digital workplace. With more than 1000 employees across 5 continents, Nexthink operates as one connected, collaborative, and innovative team to grow continuously. We call our employees "Nexthinkers" and our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity is unparalleled. We currently have more than 75 nationalities among our co