Principal Software Engineer, Back End
$180,000–$205,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Lead the multi-year architectural evolution of CD Baby's customer-facing platform from a .NET monolith into a modular, service-based architecture with clean API contracts. Decompose the monolith into encapsulated services aligned to core domains like distribution, royalties, and analytics, while owning the application data model end-to-end. Drive the full platform migration from on-premises infrastructure to the Azure cloud, ensuring the back end matches the quality of front-end work already underway. Establish and uphold engineering standards for CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and performance across the team. Partner with cross-functional groups including data engineering to design pipelines flowing into Snowflake, and mentor engineers through hands-on problem solving and code reviews.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of progressive back end software engineering experience
- Meaningful portion of experience in deep technical leadership roles — Principal, Staff, or equivalent IC
- Demonstrated track record of leading the decomposition of a monolithic application into a service-based architecture in production
- Deep, current expertise in .NET (C#)
- Deep, current expertise in SQL Server
- Experience operating .NET and SQL Server at scale in containerized environments
- Experience on a major cloud (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience translates)
- Working fluency in at least one of Go, Node.js, or Python
- Clear point of view on when to reach for Go, Node.js, or Python
- Ability to select and operate data stores beyond a single relational default (e.g., Postgres, key-value, document, search, columnar) based on the workload
- Strong experience with ORMs (Entity Framework, Dapper, or equivalents in other ecosystems)
- Clear point of view on schema design, data modeling, migrations, and the trade-offs between ORM convenience and query performance at scale
- Hands-on experience designing API contracts (REST, GraphQL, gRPC — and the trade-offs among them) between front end and back end teams
- Experience with versioning, evolution, and contract testing for API contracts
- Strong grasp of CI/CD, automated testing strategies, observability, and the operational disciplines that make continuous delivery safe at scale
- Experience partnering with data engineering on analytical pipelines
- Experience with a modern warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift
- Ability to make and defend architectural decisions
- Ability to change your mind when the evidence warrants
- Comfort working inside an existing, valuable codebase rather than rewriting it
- Relentless focus on shipping customer value in tight cycles
- Ability to break large changes into safely deployable increments
- Ability to explain trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision — in writing, in design docs, and in person
- Ability to partner naturally with product, design, data, QA, and infrastructure
- Remote within the United States
- Ability to work on Pacific Time hours
Desired Qualifications
- Music, media, or entertainment industry experience
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