Principal Backend Architect

• Own backend architecture across the platform and lead incremental decomposition of a large monolith into maintainable services
• Establish backend engineering standards, best practices, tooling, shared libraries, service templates, and platform capabilities
• Lead API and contract design, including versioning and backward compatibility
• Own event-driven architecture using Azure Service Bus, including delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery
• Define scalable customer and partner integration patterns
• Collaborate with the Data Architect on data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns, and query performance
• Improve platform reliability, security, observability, and cloud cost efficiency
• Champion AI-assisted engineering practices and adoption of AI tools and workflows
• Mentor engineers, review critical pull requests, facilitate technical office hours, and document architectural decisions through ADRs
• Contribute to incident response, technical interviews, quarterly planning, and occasional customer-facing technical discussions
• Work with the Lead/Principal Architect, Principal UI Architect, and Data Architect to drive technical direction

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including several years in architecture or technical leadership roles at the principal level
• Deep, hands-on expertise in C# and .NET
• Experience with Azure services, particularly Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Data Factory
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices
• Experience incrementally decomposing large monolithic systems
• Strong understanding of event-driven and asynchronous architectures, including message ordering, idempotency, poison messages, retries, and dead-letter queues
• Extensive experience with API design, service contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility
• Strong data-access fundamentals, including query optimization, zero-downtime migrations, and handling inconsistent or complex customer data
• Proven production ownership, including observability, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis
• Daily, hands-on use of AI development tools such as Claude, Claude Code, or comparable agentic engineering tools
• Practical experience building AI-powered solutions involving agents, reusable skills, MCP servers, or evaluations
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to provide concrete examples of personally owned architectural decisions, trade-offs, and measurable outcomes
• Pragmatic engineering mindset and strong judgment

• Company hardware will be shipped to the selected candidate
• Full-time remote independent contractor engagement
• Working on local holidays may be possible by prior arrangement