Principal Backend Engineer (Node.js, SaaS, Microservices, AWS)

iBusiness Funding; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

iBusiness Funding is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the design, evolution, and operational excellence of mission-critical backend systems powering AI-first fintech platforms.

You will shape technical direction across domains, coordinate delivery across streams, and mentor senior engineers while ensuring scalable, secure, and resilient systems. This role emphasizes autonomous leadership, architecture strategy, and collaboration with product leaders to meet business goals.

Qualifications

• Expert-level backend engineering experience with large-scale production systems.
• Deep expertise in Python, Node.js, Go or similar backend ecosystems.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native design.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive backend technical strategy across multiple teams and domains.
• Architect, design, and evolve scalable distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and platform capabilities.
• Lead complex technical initiatives with organization-wide impact and long-term goals.
• Establish and maintain engineering principles, backend standards, and architectural best practices.
• Mentor Senior/Lead Engineers and influence engineering culture without direct authority.
• Drive reliability, observability, performance, and security across backend systems.
• Collaborate with Product and business stakeholders to align capabilities with objectives.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API architecture

Cloud platforms (AWS)

Microservices

Observability / SRE

Security engineering

Technical leadership without authority

Mentoring engineers

Job description

About iBusiness

iBusinessis a leading financial technology company transforming the way banks, credit unions, and lenders innovate. As apioneerinsecureAI, automation, and AI software development,iBusinessbuilds infrastructure and platforms that empower financial institutions to modernize faster—without sacrificing compliance or security. Its technologyenablesseamless digital transformation across lending, banking, and customer experience systems, giving institutions the tools to compete and innovate at enterprise scale.

Join us and be part of a team that’s transforming the finance industry and empowering businesses to thrive!

Position Description

As a Principal Back End Engineer at iBusiness, you represent one of the most senior roles within the Product Engineering group. Your impact is felt across the organization as you lead the design, evolution, and operational excellence of mission-critical backend systems that power AI-first financial and enterprise platforms.

You are responsible for shaping technical direction across multiple domains, coordinating delivery across streams of work, and ensuring backend architecture aligns with long-term business and platform strategy. You operate with exceptional autonomy, solving highly ambiguous and technically complex problems while enabling engineering teams to deliver scalable, secure, and resilient systems.

You collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, QA, DevSecOps, and business leadership to guide technical decision-making, define engineering standards, and influence organizational outcomes through technology. You are a mentor to Lead and Senior Engineers and act as a force multiplier across the engineering organization.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive on large-scale systems design, technical leadership without people management, organizational influence, and building backend platforms that enable long-term innovation and operational excellence.

Major Areas of Responsibility

• Define and drive backend technical strategy across multiple teams and domains
• Architect, design, and evolve scalable distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and platform capabilities
• Lead complex technical initiatives with organization-wide impact, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architecture goals
• Establish and maintain engineering principles, backend standards, and architectural best practices
• Partner with Product and business stakeholders to align technical capabilities with strategic company objectives
• Guide teams through difficult architectural trade-offs, scalability challenges, and operational risks
• Drive improvements in reliability, observability, performance, resilience, and operational maturity across backend systems
• Proactively identify technical risks, bottlenecks, and systemic inefficiencies, and implement mitigation strategies
• Mentor and coach Senior and Lead Engineers through technical guidance, architecture reviews, pairing, and design discussions
• Influence engineering culture and ways of working across Product Engineering without relying on direct authority
• Lead incident analysis, operational improvement efforts, and postmortem-driven learning initiatives
• Leverage AI-assisted engineering practices and modern tooling to improve engineering effectiveness and delivery velocity
• Represent engineering strategy and technical direction effectively to both technical and executive audiences
  

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Expert-level backend engineering experience designing and operating large-scale production systems
• Deep expertise in one or more backend ecosystems such as Python, Node.js, Go or similar
• Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, microservices, and cloud-native design patterns
• Advanced knowledge of API architecture, asynchronous processing, service orchestration, and data-intensive systems
• Extensive experience operating cloud platforms and infrastructure at scale (AWS preferred)
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, reliability engineering, and operational excellence practices
• Deep understanding of software architecture, scalability, resilience, performance optimization, and security engineering
• Experience making high-impact technical decisions with broad organizational implications
• Ability to navigate highly ambiguous technical and organizational problems independently
• Strong commercial awareness and ability to connect engineering investments to customer and business outcomes
• Exceptional communication skills across technical, operational, and executive stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence engineering organizations without direct management authority
• Proven ability to establish engineering standards and drive adoption across multiple teams
• Strong understanding of secure software engineering practices and regulatory/compliance considerations in production systems

Optional: Nice to Haves

• Experience with tenant-based architecture
• Experience building AI-enabled backend systems, agentic architectures, or LLM infrastructure
• Experience with high-scale event streaming and messaging systems (SNS/SQS, RabbitMQ etc)
• Experience with data modeling, data architecture and databases in a multi-tenant architecture
• Familiarity with platform engineering and internal developer platform design
• Experience in fintech, lending, payments, or regulated enterprise environments
• Experience contributing to organization-wide technical strategy and target architecture initiatives
• Strong background in DevSecOps, infrastructure automation, and Kubernetes-based platforms
• Public speaking, technical writing, or open-source contributions within backend or distributed systems communities
• Experience working within globally distributed, fully remote engineering organizations