Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer Employment Status: Full-time Location: Vienna, Austria - Hybrid Compensation: competitive compensation + performance-based bonus and equity options. Final compensation is negotiable based on experience and qualifications. Benefits: free in-office: lunch, drinks, coffee, snacks, Wiener Linien ticket, a yearly company retreat, regular team events

Job Summary

At Ketryx, we're on a mission to help medical software teams build secure, reliable applications that make a real difference in people's lives. We give them the tools to automate the tough parts of compliance and quality so they can focus on what matters most: creating life-saving products with confidence.

We're currently hiring for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our team. In this role, you'll be helping medical device companies get their products to market faster. You'll take ownership of features from start to finish, designing the architecture, writing the code, and seeing everything through to production. Your work will have a direct impact on the future of healthcare technology.

This is a hybrid role in Vienna, with at least three days per week on-site.

What You'll Lead & Own

• Database Architecture & Optimization
• Own PostgreSQL as our core system of record—designing schemas, optimizing queries, managing indexing strategies, and ensuring the database remains performant and maintainable at scale.
• System Performance & Reliability
• Lead efforts to profile, benchmark, and optimize the entire backend stack. Design services, APIs, and workflows for low latency, high throughput, and fault tolerance.
• Maintainability at Scale
• Establish long-term standards for system design, migrations, documentation, testing, and monitoring. Ensure that as the platform grows, it remains easy to evolve, debug, and extend.
• Operational Excellence
• Drive best practices for observability, incident response, and continuous improvement. Proactively reduce technical debt and enforce reliability as a first-class feature.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Work closely with Product, Compliance, and Security to ensure system decisions align with regulatory needs—traceability, auditability, and safety are integral.
• Technical Leadership
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams. Lead strategic initiatives that improve system performance and maintainability for years to come.

Your Profile & Strengths

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with substantial scope at Staff+ level.
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge: schema design, query optimization, partitioning, indexing, and performance tuning.
• Proven track record of system-wide optimization: improving maintainability, refactoring architectures, reducing latency, and scaling reliably.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), distributed systems, and observability practices.
• Ability to set long-term architectural direction while balancing near-term business needs.
• Excellent communicator and mentor, with experience leading cross-team technical initiatives.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms that scaled successfully without sacrificing maintainability.
• Hands-on with event-driven systems, streaming pipelines, or complex API ecosystems.
• Experience implementing system-wide observability frameworks—metrics, logging, tracing, performance dashboards.
• Regulatory or high-stakes industry background (healthcare, fintech, aerospace).
• Contributions to PostgreSQL or backend/infrastructure open-source communities.
• Proven experience containerizing and orchestrating backend systems with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.

Our Tech Landscape & How You'll Influence It

• Database: PostgreSQL (core), Redis (caching)
• Backend: GraphQL (urql), Prisma, tRPC
• Infrastructure: AWS (S3, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Sentry, and Grafana (Prometheus) for monitoring
• Testing & Reliability: Jest, Cucumber, Playwright

You will set the direction for backend performance and maintainability, ensuring our systems are resilient, performant, and built to last.

Keywords: software engineering, software development, databases, principal software engineer, change requirement, V-Model, engineer, SaaS, customer feedback, computer science, comp sci, startup, Series A, Series B, technology, tech, software, senior engineer, lead engineer, staff engineer, principal engineer

Ketryx is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Ketryx is saving and improving lives by making medical software safe and reliable. We empower software teams building medical applications to create safe, secure, and compliant products used by patients and providers worldwide. We believe that, by automating much of the documentation and quality processes, teams will be able to produce safer and more innovative medical software faster.

Ketryx is at the forefront of helping teams incorporate AI/ML into medical software and that's why we need you!