Principal Software Engineer Backend Jobs (NOW HIRING)

**Position Overview**You will function as a technical authority and force multiplier—guiding design decisions, setting standards, and ensuring Autodesk’s core data services are reliable, resilient, and evolvable over time.**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 critical backend systems and APIs, ensuring they meet long-term scalability, reliability, and extensibility goals* Lead design of distributed, event-driven systems, addressing consistency, ordering, failure handling, replay, idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure* Establish and drive service and API standards across domains, including schema design, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and consumer experience* Act as a technical decision-maker for cross-team initiatives; evaluate tradeoffs and make durable architectural choices aligned with business priorities* Drive operational excellence across systems you influence: observability, alerting strategy, incident response, post-incident learning, and systemic remediation* Introduce and reinforce engineering best practices for design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and production readiness across multiple teams* Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; raise the bar through influence, example, and coaching rather than direct management* Partner deeply with product, data, and platform leaders to translate ambiguous business problems into clear, actionable technical solutionsWe are seeking a Principal Software Engineer – Backend to join Autodesk’s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) organization within the COO-GET Engineering group. This is a senior individual contributor role operating at the Principal (P4) level, expected to drive technology direction for large, complex, and business-critical backend and distributed systems. This role is anchored in backend software engineering excellence: designing, building, and evolving scalable services, APIs, and event-driven systems that operate at enterprise scale. As a Principal Engineer, you will work with high autonomy and ambiguity, shape long-term architecture, and influence multiple teams and domains. Familiarity with data engineering concepts is valuable, but backend systems, service design, and distributed systems are the core competencies. * Remain hands-on where impact is highest: complex system design, critical implementations, architectural refactors, and high-severity incident resolution**Minimum Qualifications*** Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience* 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend and distributed systems* Demonstrated expertise building and operating backend services and APIs in production environments at scale* Strong experience with 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 patterns)* Proven ownership of mission-critical systems, including design accountability, operational responsibility, and long-term maintainability* Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, service-level data modeling, API design, automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code* Track record of influencing architecture and engineering outcomes across multiple teams without formal authority* Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences**Preferred Qualifications*** Experience building enterprise platform services consumed by many internal and/or external teams* Familiarity with data engineering or data platform ecosystems (e.g., streaming pipelines, data warehouses such as Snowflake) as a producer or advanced consumer of data services* Experience with event streaming and messaging platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalents)* Background in domains such as master data management, identity resolution, data enrichment, or data quality* Experience integrating backend services with analytics, search/indexing, or ML/AI platforms* Prior experience operating in large, complex organizations where systems span multiple teams, regions, and business units #J-18808-Ljbffr