Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Autodesk is a leader in software that helps innovators turn their ideas into reality. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer – Backend to drive technology direction for large, complex backend and distributed systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and extensibility of services and APIs.

Responsibilities:

• 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:

• 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
• Experience building enterprise platform services consumed by many internal and/or external teams
• Familiarity with data engineering or data platform ecosystems (e.g., streaming pipelines, data warehouses such as Snowflake) as a producer or advanced consumer of data services
• Experience with event streaming and messaging platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalents)
• Background in domains such as master data management, identity resolution, data enrichment, or data quality
• Experience integrating backend services with analytics, search/indexing, or ML/AI platforms
• Prior experience operating in large, complex organizations where systems span multiple teams, regions, and business units