Principal Backend Architect: Enterprise Data at Scale

Autodesk; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 139,000 - 249,000; Full time

Job summary

Autodesk is seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Backend to join the EDM organization in the COO-GET Engineering group. This senior individual contributor role will drive technology direction for large, complex backend systems at enterprise scale.

You will design, build, and evolve scalable services and APIs, lead cross-team architectural decisions, and mentor engineers while maintaining a hands-on focus where impact is greatest.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with backend and distributed systems
• Experience building enterprise platform services consumed by multiple teams
• Python + AWS + API + backend services integration experience
• Strong expertise in backend services and APIs in production at scale
• 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)
• Proven ownership of mission-critical systems with design accountability and long-term maintainability
• Strong fundamentals: system design, API design, automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code
• Track record of influencing architecture across teams without formal authority
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills enabling complex 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 backend systems and APIs, ensuring scalability, reliability, and extensibility
• Lead design of distributed, event-driven systems with attention to consistency, ordering, failure handling, and backpressure
• Establish and drive API standards across domains, including schema design, versioning, backward compatibility, and UX
• Act as a technical decision-maker for cross-team initiatives; evaluate tradeoffs and durable architectural choices
• Drive operational excellence across systems you influence: observability, incident response, and remediation
• Introduce and reinforce engineering best practices for design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and production readiness
• Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; raise the bar through influence and coaching
• Partner with product, data, and platform leaders to translate ambiguous problems into actionable technical solutions
• Remain hands-on where impact is highest: complex system design, critical implementations, architectural refactors, incident resolution

Skills

Python

AWS

API

Backend services

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Data engineering concepts

Education

BSc / MSc in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Snowflake

Job description

Autodesk is seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Backend to join the EDM organization in the COO-GET Engineering group. This senior individual contributor role will drive technology direction for large, complex backend systems at enterprise scale.

You will design, build, and evolve scalable services and APIs, lead cross-team architectural decisions, and mentor engineers while maintaining a hands-on focus where impact is greatest.