Principal Software Engineer – Backend

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Provide principal-level technical guidance across various backend and platform teams, shaping the architecture and technical strategy that extends beyond a single squad or service.

• Author and enhance essential backend systems and APIs, ensuring they align with long-term goals for scalability, reliability, and extensibility.

• Lead the design of distributed, event-driven systems, addressing aspects such as consistency, ordering, failure handling, replay, idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure.

• Establish and promote service and API standards across domains, including schema design, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and consumer experience.

• Serve as a technical decision-maker for cross-team initiatives; assess trade-offs and make sustainable architectural choices that align with business priorities.

• Drive operational excellence in the systems you impact: focusing on observability, alerting strategy, incident response, post-incident learning, and systemic remediation.

• Introduce and uphold engineering best practices for design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and production readiness across multiple teams.

• Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; elevate standards through influence, example, and coaching rather than direct management.

• Collaborate closely with product, data, and platform leaders to translate ambiguous business challenges into clear, actionable technical solutions.

• Remain hands-on where the impact is greatest: involving complex system design, critical implementations, architectural refactors, and high-severity incident resolution.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Over 10 years of professional software engineering experience, with significant expertise in backend and distributed systems.

• Proven expertise in 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.

• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures (compute, storage, messaging, IAM, observability, scaling patterns).

• Demonstrated ownership of mission-critical systems, encompassing design accountability, operational responsibility, and long-term maintainability.

• Solid software engineering fundamentals: system design, service-level data modeling, API design, automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.

• Track record of influencing architectural and engineering outcomes across multiple teams without formal authority.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of clearly articulating complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health and financial benefits.

• Time away.

• Everyday wellness.