Principal Backend Architect

About the role

Our client is a US‑based software company with a 30‑person engineering team that maintains a large monolithic platform and an expanding set of microservices. They are seeking a Principal Backend Architect/Engineer to own the backend architecture, guide the decomposition of the monolith, and stay hands‑on with implementation.

Key responsibilities

• Own the backend architecture across the platform and lead incremental decomposition of a large monolith into maintainable services.
• Establish engineering standards, best practices, shared libraries, and service templates.
• Lead API and contract design, ensuring versioning, backward compatibility, and reliable communication.
• Own event‑driven architecture using Azure Service Bus, handling delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Define scalable patterns for customer and partner integrations with observability and traceability.
• Collaborate with Data Architect on data ownership, transactional boundaries, and query performance.
• Improve platform reliability, security, observability, and cloud cost efficiency.
• Champion AI‑assisted engineering practices and mentor engineers.

Required profile

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including several years in principal‑level architecture or technical leadership.
• Deep hands‑on expertise in C# and .NET, delivering secure, scalable commercial backend systems.
• Practical experience with Azure services, especially Azure Functions, Service Bus, and Data Factory.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.
• Proven track record of incrementally decomposing large monoliths with safe, reversible changes.
• Strong understanding of event‑driven, asynchronous architectures and API design.
• Daily hands‑on use of AI development tools such as Claude or comparable agents.
• Excellent written and spoken English.

Required skills

• C#
• .NET
• Azure Functions
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure Data Factory
• PostgreSQL
• Cosmos DB
• Snowflake
• CI/CD pipelines
• DevOps
• AI development tools (Claude, Claude Code)