Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Position Overview 

We are seeking aPrincipal Software Engineer – Backendto join Autodesk’s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) organization within the COO-GET Engineering group. This is a senior individual contributor roleoperatingat thePrincipal(P4) level, expected to drive technology direction forlarge, complex, and business-critical backend and distributed systems. 

This role is anchored inbackend software engineering excellence: designing, building, and evolving scalable services, APIs, and event-driven systems thatoperateat enterprise scale. As a Principal Engineer, you will work withhigh 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. 

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

• Provideprincipal-level technical leadershipacross multiple backend and platform teams, shaping architecture and technical strategy beyond a single squad or service

• Author and evolvecritical backend systems and APIs, ensuring they meet long-term scalability, reliability, and extensibility goals

• Lead design ofdistributed, event-driven systems, addressing consistency, ordering, failure handling, replay, idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure

• Establish and driveservice and API standardsacross 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

• Driveoperational excellenceacross systems youinfluence:observability, alerting strategy, incident response, post-incident learning, and systemic remediation

• Introduce and reinforceengineering best practicesfor design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and production readiness across multiple teams

• Mentor senior engineers and emerging technicalleaders;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 solutions

• Remain hands-on where impact is highest: complex system design, critical implementations, architectural refactors, and high-severity incident resolution

Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s orMaster’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

• Demonstratedexpertisebuilding and operatingbackend services and APIsin production environments at scale

• Strong experience withdistributed systems design, including asynchronous processing, messaging, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance

• Deep hands-on experience withAWSand cloud-native architectures (compute, storage, messaging, IAM, observability, scaling patterns)

• Proven ownership ofmission-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, andinfrastructure ascode

• Track recordof influencing architecture and engineering outcomesacross multiple teamswithout formal authority

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience buildingenterprise platform servicesconsumed by many internal and/or external teams

• Familiarity withdata engineering or data platform ecosystems(e.g., streaming pipelines, data warehouses such as Snowflake) as a producer or advanced consumer of data services

• Experience withevent streaming and messaging platforms(e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalents)

• Background in domains such asmaster data management, identity resolution, data enrichment, or data quality

• Experience integrating backend services with analytics, search/indexing, or ML/AI platforms

• Prior experienceoperatingin large, complex organizations where systems span multiple teams, regions, and business units