Principal Backend Architect – Scalable Distributed Systems

PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPER SENIOR

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization

• Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers

• Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence

• Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability

• Deliver new features and improvements to our core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination

• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact

• Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load

• Identify opportunities to modernize our backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability

• Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality

• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization

• Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives

• Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end – frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are your

primary focus

What We’re Looking For Evidence of Engineering Accomplishment

• Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact

• Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with high throughput and reliability requirements

• Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality

• Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns

• Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications

• Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks

• Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response

• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Experience with data architecture including relational and No

SQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance

Technical Excellence

• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (Java, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of language ecosystems and tooling

• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles including consistency models, consensus algorithms, failure modes, and reliability patterns

• Working knowledge of cloud engineering paradigms, asynchronous systems, service integration patterns, and event-driven architectures

• Experience with automated testing strategies including unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end system testing

• Practical knowledge of system performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost optimization

• Understanding of security principles including authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and secure coding practices

• Experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies

• Familiarity with container orchestration…