Principal Software Engineer(Back End)

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Software Engineer (Back End) based in the United States.** ## Role Overview The Principal Software Engineer (Back End) will shape the technical vision and architecture of scalable, secure, and high-performing software systems supporting critical government services. In this senior technical leadership role, you will drive backend engineering excellence, design distributed systems, and establish architectural standards across multiple teams. You will lead complex modernization initiatives, develop reliable cloud-native solutions, and improve the performance and maintainability of core applications. Working closely with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders, you will translate strategic objectives into practical technical solutions with measurable impact. You will also mentor engineering talent, influence organization-wide technical decisions, and champion best practices in software development, security, and system reliability. This fully remote opportunity offers the chance to solve complex engineering challenges while contributing to mission-critical digital services in a collaborative, innovation-driven environment. ### Accountabilities - Define and drive the strategic direction of backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical standards across the organization. - Design, develop, and maintain scalable, secure, and reliable distributed systems that support government customers and mission-critical services. - Lead the architecture and implementation of microservices, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud-native infrastructure to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability. - Deliver new features and enhancements to core services, including customer intake, application screening, information processing, and data dissemination. - Lead large-scale technical initiatives, including system modernization, migration from monolithic architectures to microservices, and the adoption of modern engineering technologies. - Establish and promote engineering best practices covering API design, data modeling, automated testing, observability, security, code quality, and documentation. - Develop shared libraries, reusable service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that improve consistency, reduce complexity, and accelerate development across teams. - Design and optimize distributed system components, including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, database integrations, and data consistency mechanisms. - Oversee system reliability, monitoring, and performance through structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and disaster recovery strategies. - Champion secure software development and ensure appropriate implementation of authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and other security controls. - Drive CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, container orchestration, and DevOps practices to streamline delivery and improve operational efficiency. - Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional stakeholders to balance technical feasibility, business priorities, system performance, security, and cost considerations. - Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, establish backend engineering development pathways, and foster a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning. - Serve as a technical authority and strategic advisor, influencing architectural decisions and engineering standards across teams while communicating complex concepts clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences. ## Requirements - At least 10 years of relevant software engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing, building, and delivering scalable, production-ready distributed systems with measurable business or operational impact. - U.S. citizenship is required, along with the ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust 6C clearance. - Extensive experience architecting and implementing large-scale microservices and distributed systems with demanding throughput, availability, reliability, and performance requirements. - Strong proficiency in modern programming languages such as Java, Python, or comparable technologies, with a deep understanding of associated development tools and ecosystems. - Demonstrated expertise in cloud platforms, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS), with familiarity with Azure or Google Cloud Platform considered valuable. - Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including consistency models, failure handling, availability, partition tolerance, resilience patterns, and system design trade-offs. - Hands-on experience designing and developing REST, GraphQL, or comparable APIs, including API versioning, backward compatibility, and service integration strategies. - Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, schema design, indexing, query optimization, data migration, and governance. - Familiarity with messaging systems and event-streaming technologies such as Kafka, Amazon SQS, and Amazon EventBridge, as well as asynchronous processing patterns. - Practical experience with Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation, and modern DevOps practices. - Proven ability to establish and maintain CI/CD pipelines incorporating automated testing, security scanning, and reliable deployment strategies. - Strong knowledge of automated testing methodologies, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with observability, monitoring, and incident management practices. - Experience leading system modernization initiatives, optimizing application performance and cloud costs, and designing resilient systems with circuit breakers, retry mechanisms, graceful degradation, and disaster recovery capabilities. - Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives from architectural vision through production implementation, influencing engineering decisions across multiple teams. - Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, product managers, executives, and external stakeholders. - A strong commitment to code quality, documentation, engineering standards, mentoring, and continuous improvement. - Familiarity with user experience principles and web development is beneficial, although backend engineering remains the primary focus. ## Benefits - **Competitive compensation:** Annual salary range of $147,292–$199,278, depending on experience, geographic location, and applicable contractual requirements. - **Remote work:** Fully remote working arrangement with opportunities for flexible work schedules. - **Flexible working arrangements:** Full flexible workweeks where operationally possible, supporting work-life balance. - **Healthcare coverage:** Multiple medical plan options, including plans with Health Savings Accounts, as well as dental and vision insurance. - **Retirement planning:** 401(k) retirement savings plan with employer matching and pre-tax and post-tax contribution options, subject to applicable limits. - **Paid time off:** Typically 15 days of paid leave per calendar year for eligible new employees, covering vacation, personal needs, and illness, prorated according to the start date. - **Paid holidays:** 10 paid holidays annually, with applicable proration based on the date of hire. - **Family support:** Paid parental leave and a dedicated Paid Family Leave program offering eligible employees up to 160 hours of paid leave within a rolling 12-month period. - **Additional leave programs:** Paid sick, personal, military, bereavement, and jury duty leave, subject to applicable policies. - **Income protection:** Short-term and long-term disability benefits, life insurance, accidental death and dismemberment coverage, and additional accident and critical illness insurance options. - **Business travel protection:** Business travel and accident insurance coverage or availability. - **Professional impact:** Opportunities to work on complex, mission-critical technology initiatives involving cloud computing, distributed systems, software engineering, and digital modernization. - **Collaborative environment:** Opportunities to mentor engineers, influence technical strategy, and contribute to engineering standards and organizational development.