Principal Engineer - 2 (ECC)

About Exotel

Exotel is the emerging market's leading full-stack customer engagement platform and business-focused virtual telecom operator. Incorporated in 2011, Exotel's cloud-based product suite powers 50 million daily engagements across voice, video and messaging channels. Exotel powers unified customer engagement to over 6000 companies in 60+ countries, including India, SE Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Today, some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets (Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, GoJek, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, Oyo, etc.) manage their customer engagement with Exotel's suite of communication APIs, Ameyo's omnichannel contact centre (merger), and Cogno AI's conversational AI platform (acquisition) over the cloud. We are a $100 million Series D funded company with $60 million in ARR.

The Role

We are seeking a seasoned and visionary Senior Principal Engineer to join our core Contact Center team. This is a senior technical leadership role where you will be instrumental in shaping the future of our product. You will be responsible for the end-to-end technical ownership of our Enterprise Contact Center solution, from defining its architectural roadmap to ensuring its operational reliability. The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker with a deep understanding of contact center technologies, a passion for engineering excellence, and a proven track record of influencing and leading technical direction.

Responsibilities

Product Design and Architecture :

Lead the design and architecture of our multi-tenant, highly available, and scalable Enterprise Contact Center platform.

Define the technical vision and long-term architectural roadmap, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices.

Architect and design core components, including but not limited to, omnichannel routing (voice, email, chat, social), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, outbound dialers, and real-time and historical reporting and analytics.

Drive the evolution of our platform to incorporate emerging technologies such as AI / ML for intelligent routing, sentiment analysis, and workforce optimization.

Technical Influence and Evangelism :

Champion and evangelize modern software development methodologies, including Agile, and foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and accountability.

Mentor and provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers, fostering their growth and ensuring high-quality design and implementation.

Collaborate with product management, engineering teams, and other stakeholders to translate product requirements into robust and scalable technical solutions.

Act as a subject matter expert on contact center technologies, representing the company at industry forums, and with key customers and partners.

Reliability and Accountability :

Take ultimate accountability for the reliability, performance, and scalability of the Enterprise Contact Center product.

Establish and enforce service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) for the platform.

Proactively identify and mitigate technical risks, and lead the resolution of complex production issues.

Drive a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement, leveraging data and feedback to enhance system performance.

DevSecOps Leadership :

Champion and integrate DevSecOps best practices into the entire software development lifecycle.

Influence the design and implementation of our CI / CD pipelines, ensuring security is embedded from code to deployment.

Lead threat modeling exercises and security design reviews to identify and address potential vulnerabilities.

Promote a 'security-as-code' mindset, automating security controls and compliance checks.

Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

12+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a senior architect or principal engineer role for an enterprise-grade product.

In-depth understanding of Telephony and VoIP Technologies :

Expertise in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SIP Trunking, and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP).

Hands-on experience with core contact center functionalities such as Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), and call recording.

Familiarity with WebRTC and its application in contact center solutions.

Proven expertise in System Design and Architecture :

Demonstrated experience in designing and building large-scale, distributed, and highly available systems.

Strong understanding of microservices architecture, domain-driven design, and event-driven architectures.

Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

Decent understanding of DevSecOps :

Familiarity with CI / CD principles and tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI).

Knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.

Understanding of security best practices in a cloud-native environment.

Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to navigate complex technical challenges.

Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence and align cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Asterisk PBX.

Knowledge of AI / ML applications in the contact center space (e.g., NLP, chatbots, predictive analytics).

Experience with data streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka) for real-time analytics.

Familiarity with compliance standards such as PCI-DSS and GDPR in the context of a contact center.