Principal Backend Architect - Distributed Systems & APIs

Autodesk; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 139,000 - 249,000; Full time

Job summary

Autodesk is seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Backend for the EDM organization in the COO-GET Engineering group. You will drive architecture, design, and implementation of scalable backend services and event-driven systems at enterprise scale.

You will lead cross-team initiatives, set engineering standards, and mentor senior engineers while maintaining hands-on involvement in critical systems and incidents.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Experience building enterprise platform services consumed by many internal and/or external teams.
• Python + AWS + API + backend services integration experience.
• 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.

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.

Skills

Python

AWS

APIs

Backend services

Distributed systems

Event-driven design

CI/CD

Code quality

System design

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS or related field

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Snowflake

Job description

Autodesk is seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Backend for the EDM organization in the COO-GET Engineering group. You will drive architecture, design, and implementation of scalable backend services and event-driven systems at enterprise scale.

You will lead cross-team initiatives, set engineering standards, and mentor senior engineers while maintaining hands-on involvement in critical systems and incidents.