Principal Software Engineer - Backend or Data (AI)

Location: Dublin, Ireland; hybrid work with 2 days per week on-site. Applicants must have the legal right to work in Ireland at the time of application. Collaboration spans Ireland and US time zones.

Salary: €92,850–€154,750 per year, with potential discretionary annual bonus or commissions.

Company

hirify.global Mail provides a large-scale consumer email service used by more than 220 million monthly active users, supported by petabyte-scale infrastructure.

What you will do

• Design, build, and evolve backend services and data pipelines for AI/ML personalization and assistive intelligence.
• Lead performance, scalability, cost, and reliability improvements across high-volume systems.
• Build self-healing pipelines, graceful degradation mechanisms, and automated diagnostics.
• Establish automated data quality and compliance frameworks for petabyte-scale datasets.
• Align service and data architecture roadmaps between Dublin and US-based engineering teams.
• Define best practices for AI-assisted development, including security, scalability, and validation of AI-generated code.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in backend engineering, data engineering, or big data processing on complex, high-scale systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Expertise in either large-scale data systems or high-throughput backend services, with working knowledge of the other area.
• Strong proficiency in an object-oriented language, preferably Java or Python, and strong SQL skills.
• Experience with batch or streaming data pipelines, Spark or an equivalent technology, high-scale server applications, and public cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated use of AI coding assistants and LLMs, plus strong communication skills for influencing technical direction across international teams.

Nice to have

• Spec-driven development experience.
• Google Cloud Platform experience, especially DataProc, Dataflow, Composer, or Airflow.
• Hadoop ecosystem experience.
• Experience with email protocols, high-volume messaging platforms, NLP, or large-scale personalization engines.
• Experience bridging international engineering hubs.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first engineering environment with high standards for code quality and architectural rigor.
• Flexible-hybrid approach with occasional on-site sessions, team-building activities, or other in-person events.
• Healthcare, pension, and a flexible benefits package.
• Equal opportunity and accessibility support throughout the application and employment process.