Principal Backend Engineer – Payments & AI-Driven Platform

Eliassen Group; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 96,000 - 105,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision benefits

401k with company matching

life insurance

Job summary

Eliassen Group is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead backend services and APIs for a high-volume payment processing platform. You will drive release engineering, DevOps pipelines, observability, reliability, and secure SDLC in an AI-enabled environment.

The role is on-site in Los Angeles and is contract-to-hire, with W2-based benefits and potential full-time conversion. You will mentor engineers and shape scalable platform practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 2+ years as a hands-on technical lead.
• Expertise in C#, .NET, SQL Server, and Azure services such as AKS, Service Bus, App Services, and Azure DevOps.
• Strong knowledge of RESTful API design, OAuth2, and microservices.
• Hands-on with queuing, multithreading, and distributed computing using Kafka, Service Bus, or MQ.
• Proven ownership of test automation frameworks beyond unit testing, integrated with CI/CD.
• Observability experience with Datadog or similar tools.
• Experience in payments or financial services with high transaction volume.
• Familiarity with GitHub Actions and container orchestration.
• Secure coding and compliance in regulated environments such as PCI DSS or SOC 2.
• Experience with Agile methodologies and tools such as JIRA.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of backend services and RESTful APIs for payment processing at scale.
• Drive release engineering, Azure-based DevOps pipelines, and secure SDLC practices.
• Design and optimize distributed, event-driven architectures using queues and messaging.
• Implement observability with Datadog or equivalent, including alerting and incident response.
• Own test automation frameworks and integrate suites into CI/CD.
• Advance CI/CD workflows, platform reliability, and SLA adherence.
• Collaborate with QA, Security, and Infrastructure for seamless deployments.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices.
• Translate stakeholder requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Operate in an AI-driven SDLC and implement intelligent testing capabilities.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

RESTful APIs

C#

.NET

SQL Server

OAuth2

Distributed systems

Azure

Kafka/Service Bus/MQ

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Azure DevOps

AKS

Service Bus

App Services

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Job description

Eliassen Group is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead backend services and APIs for a high-volume payment processing platform. You will drive release engineering, DevOps pipelines, observability, reliability, and secure SDLC in an AI-enabled environment.

The role is on-site in Los Angeles and is contract-to-hire, with W2-based benefits and potential full-time conversion. You will mentor engineers and shape scalable platform practices.