Strategic Backend Architect & Tech Leader

General Dynamics - IT; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

General Dynamics - IT seeks a Principal Software Engineer Back End to lead backend and full-stack engineering practices, shaping architecture and technical excellence for government-scale systems. You will drive scalable, secure distributed platforms, defining service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns to empower teams and deliver high-impact features.

You will mentor engineers, advocate for best practices, and collaborate with product managers to balance feasibility with

Qualifications

• Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact.
• Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with high throughput and reliability requirements.
• Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality.
• Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns.
• Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications.
• Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Experience with data architecture including relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization.
• Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers.
• Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence.
• Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability.
• Deliver new features and improvements to our core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact.
• Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load.
• Identify opportunities to modernize our backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability.
• Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization.
• Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives.
• Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end – frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are your primary focus.

Skills

Distributed systems

Microservices

Backend architecture

APIs (REST/GraphQL)

Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)

CI/CD

Observability

Security best practices

Mentoring

Leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

Docker

Kafka

SQS

EventBridge

ECS

Job description

General Dynamics - IT seeks a Principal Software Engineer Back End to lead backend and full-stack engineering practices, shaping architecture and technical excellence for government-scale systems. You will drive scalable, secure distributed platforms, defining service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns to empower teams and deliver high-impact features.

You will mentor engineers, advocate for best practices, and collaborate with product managers to balance feasibility with