Principal Software Engineer – Backend

Autodesk

. Provide principal-level technical leadership across multiple backend and platform teams, shaping architecture and technical strategy beyond a single squad or service .

Posted 4/21/2026full-timeRemote • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $139,000 - $249,260 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed Systems

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Provide principal-level technical leadership across multiple backend and platform teams, shaping architecture and technical strategy beyond a single squad or service
Author and evolve critical backend systems and APIs, ensuring they meet long-term scalability, reliability, and extensibility goals
Lead design of distributed, event-driven systems, addressing consistency, ordering, failure handling, replay, idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure
Establish and drive service and API standards across domains, including schema design, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and consumer experience
Act as a technical decision-maker for cross-team initiatives; evaluate tradeoffs and make durable architectural choices aligned with business priorities
Drive operational excellence across systems you influence: observability, alerting strategy, incident response, post-incident learning, and systemic remediation
Introduce and reinforce engineering best practices for design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and production readiness across multiple teams
Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; raise the bar through influence, example, and coaching rather than direct management
Partner deeply with product, data, and platform leaders to translate ambiguous business problems into clear, actionable technical solutions
Remain hands-on where impact is highest: complex system design, critical implementations, architectural refactors, and high-severity incident resolution

Requirements

What you’ll need

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend and distributed systems
Demonstrated expertise building and operating backend services and APIs in production environments at scale
Strong experience with distributed systems design, including asynchronous processing, messaging, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance
Deep hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures (compute, storage, messaging, IAM, observability, scaling patterns)
Proven ownership of mission-critical systems, including design accountability, operational responsibility, and long-term maintainability
Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, service-level data modeling, API design, automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code
Track record of influencing architecture and engineering outcomes across multiple teams without formal authority
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Benefits

Comp & perks

health and financial benefits
time away
everyday wellness

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

backend systemsAPIsdistributed systems designasynchronous processingmessagingeventual consistencyfault tolerancesystem designAPI designinfrastructure as code

Soft Skills

technical leadershipmentoringinfluencecommunicationcollaborationproblem-solvingdecision-makingcoachingoperational excellencepost-incident learning

Certifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer ScienceMaster’s degree in Computer Science