Principal Backend Architect - Distributed Systems Leader

General Dynamics - IT; Home (KS); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

General Dynamics - IT is seeking a Principal Software Developer Senior to define strategic backend and full-stack engineering directions. You will lead scalable, secure distributed systems for government customers, acting as the technical authority for architecture and data design.

You will mentor engineers, establish backend standards, and drive modernization across teams, ensuring high performance and reliability of core services.

Qualifications

• Experience leading production-ready distributed systems with measurable impact.
• Architectural patterns for microservices with high throughput and reliability.
• Background establishing backend standards and patterns.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and data consistency.
• Experience designing REST/GraphQL APIs for customer-facing apps.
• Leadership in modernization from monoliths to microservices.
• Observability, monitoring, and incident response expertise.
• Cloud-native architectures and IaC practices (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Data modeling with relational and NoSQL databases.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive backend and full-stack engineering strategy and best practices.
• Lead development of scalable, secure distributed systems for government customers.
• Serve as technical authority on system architecture and data design.
• Design service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns.
• Deliver features to core services including intake, screening, and dissemination.
• Balance technical feasibility with business needs; communicate trade-offs.
• Mentor engineers and establish backend career development pathways.
• Drive architectural decisions across teams and modernization initiatives.
• Overlap frontend/infrastructure understanding; backend is primary focus.

Skills

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Microservices

Architectural leadership

Mentoring

Security best practices

API design

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS/Azure/GCP

Terraform/CloudFormation

Kafka/SQS/EventBridge

CI/CD pipelines

Docker

Job description

General Dynamics - IT is seeking a Principal Software Developer Senior to define strategic backend and full-stack engineering directions. You will lead scalable, secure distributed systems for government customers, acting as the technical authority for architecture and data design.

You will mentor engineers, establish backend standards, and drive modernization across teams, ensuring high performance and reliability of core services.