Principal Engineer

SPEED & SPIRIT is what we look for in our candidates, defined by some simple values that inspire us to BE DRIVEN in our performance, BE VIBRANT in our sporting legacy, BE TOGETHER in our team spirit, and to let our individual talent and experience shine. Applying for a job at PUMA is easy. Simply click APPLY ONLINE and follow the steps to upload your application. YOUR MISSION PUMA is building a world-class Direct-to-Consumer engineering organisation from the ground up at our new GCC TechHub in Pune. The Principal Engineer – Integration is a critical org-wide technical leadership role within D2C Platform Engineering, responsible for designing, governing, and evolving the integration fabric that connects every product capability, commerce service, and external partner across the DTC ecosystem. This is not a team-scoped role. As a Principal Engineer, you operate across all four engineering organisations - Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, Core Commerce Platform, and D2C Platform Engineering - and your work defines how these systems talk to each other. You will own the API gateway strategy, integration architecture standards, and developer enablement practices that underpin PUMA's ability to build and deploy capabilities at speed and scale. You will be a practitioner-leader: hands-on enough to make architectural decisions with conviction, and senior enough to influence engineering culture, drive standards adoption, and mentor a generation of engineers building PUMA's digital future. You will partner directly with the Director of Platform Engineering and peer Principal Engineers to shape an integration platform that is observable, resilient, AI-native, and built to evolve. As PUMA continues to scale its DTC Engineering organisation, Principal Engineers are expected to be visible technical role models. These roles are office-based and require regular in-person collaboration to accelerate decision-making, strengthen technical cohesion, and build engineering excellence from the ground up. Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership: Integration Architecture & API Platform Own the end-to-end integration architecture for the DTC platform - defining how internal services, packaged solutions, and external partners connect, communicate, and exchange data. Lead the design and governance of PUMA's API gateway strategy on Apigee, including policy framework, traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, and API product management. Define and enforce API design standards - RESTful patterns, GraphQL schema design principles, versioning strategy, deprecation policy, and contract-first development practices. Architect the GraphQL API layer that serves consumer-facing surfaces (web, mobile, agentic commerce), including schema stitching, federation strategy, and resolver performance optimisation. Design event-driven integration patterns using message brokers and streaming platforms to ensure loose coupling and high resilience across commerce and fulfilment services. Own the integration reference architecture for PUMA's composable commerce stack - ensuring Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Fluent Commerce OMS, payment gateways, and external logistics partners integrate cleanly and durably. API Governance & Developer Enablement Establish and maintain an API governance framework - including design reviews, approval gates, documentation standards, and quality metrics - applied consistently across all engineering organisations. Build and own the internal API developer portal and integration catalogue, enabling product squads to discover, consume, and contribute integration capabilities efficiently. Define and enforce integration testing standards - contract testing, API regression suites, and integration environment strategy - across the platform. Champion developer productivity through reusable integration libraries, SDK patterns, and shared tooling that reduce the time-to-integrate for product squads. Produce clear architectural decision records (ADRs), integration playbooks, and runbooks that codify patterns and accelerate onboarding for new engineering squads. AI-Native Integration Engineering Embed AI-native practices into the integration platform - from AI-assisted API design and automated contract generation to intelligent anomaly detection in integration pipelines. Architect integration patterns for agentic commerce and LLM-driven workflows, including tool-calling APIs, model context orchestration, and AI agent connectivity to commerce and fulfilment backends. Evaluate and adopt AI tooling (code generation, API testing, observability) that improves integration engineering velocity and quality across the platform. Partner with the Consumer Intelligence & Engagement team to ensure ML and GenAI services are exposed and consumed through well-governed, performant integration contracts. Reliability, Observability & Security Define and own non-functional requirements for the integration layer - latency budgets, availability SLOs, retry and circuit-breaker patterns, and graceful degradation strategies. Design and implement comprehensive observability for all integration touchpoints - distributed tracing, API metrics dashboards, error budget tracking, and alerting on integration health. Own the security posture of the integration layer - OAuth 2.0 implementation, mutual TLS, secrets management, payload encryption, and PCI-DSS-compliant data handling for payment integrations. Lead capacity planning and load testing for critical integration paths, particularly during peak commerce events (product launches, seasonal peaks). Define incident response and escalation protocols for integration failures affecting consumer-facing surfaces. Technical Leadership & Mentorship Act as the senior-most technical authority on integration across all DTC engineering squads - providing architecture guidance, design review, and escalation support organisation-wide. Mentor and develop Lead and Senior Engineers in integration engineering patterns, API design, and distributed systems thinking. Drive a culture of engineering excellence - championing code quality, test coverage, documentation standards, and continuous improvement in integration practices. Represent PUMA's integration engineering perspective in cross-functional architecture forums and contribute to the broader DTC engineering strategy. Collaborate with vendor and partner engineering teams to define and enforce integration contracts, onboarding standards, and quality expectations. YOUR TALENT Key Requirements: 10–15 years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 4–5 years focused on integration architecture, API platform engineering, or distributed systems at scale. Deep expertise in integration patterns, with proven experience managing enterprise integrations across open-source and packaged solutions. Experience with enterprise application integration platforms (e.g., TIBCO, IBM App Connect, MuleSoft) is a plus. Expertise with GraphQL - including schema design, federation, resolver optimisation, subscriptions, and the operational trade-offs of GraphQL at scale. Proven experience designing and governing enterprise API platforms on Apigee or equivalent - including API proxy design, policy management, developer portals, analytics. Strong command of RESTful API design, OpenAPI/Swagger specification, versioning strategies, and backward-compatibility management. Solid experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub - including event schema design, consumer group management, and dead-letter handling. Demonstrated ability to operate as an org-wide technical authority - influencing architecture across multiple teams and driving standards adoption without direct line authority. Track record of building developer enablement assets - internal API catalogues, integration SDKs, documentation frameworks, and onboarding tooling. Experience with contract testing