Principal Staff Backend Engineer

We are seeking an accomplished Principal Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise systems. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and architect platforms that power mission-critical products. This is a hands-on leadership role that spans cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, data platforms, and AI integration.

What You Will Do

• Architect and Design: Define large scale distributed architectures for reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Technical Leadership: Drive engineering standards, code quality, and operational excellence while mentoring senior engineers.
• Modern Services: Build and optimize microservices, APIs, and data pipelines using current enterprise technologies.
• Enterprise Delivery: Meet strict security, compliance, and performance requirements for global customers.
• Innovation: Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies where they add measurable value.

Core Languages

• Expert in at least one of Python, Java, or C++
• Bonus: Go, Rust, or Scala

Cloud and Infrastructure

• Cloud: AWS, Azure, or GCP (multi-cloud experience is a plus)
• Containers and Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
• Serverless: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions
• Networking and Service Mesh: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy, NGINX
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Jenkins, Spinnaker

APIs and Services

• API Styles: REST, GraphQL, gRPC
• Architectures: Microservices, event-driven, CQRS, Saga patterns
• Gateway and Management: Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, NGINX

Data and Streaming

• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle
• NoSQL and Caching: DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached
• Streaming and Batch: Kafka, Pulsar, Spark, Flink, Airflow, dbt
• Analytics and Warehousing: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks
• Search and Indexing: Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr
• Object Storage and Lakehouse: S3, GCS, ADLS, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Hudi

AI and Advanced Capabilities

• ML Frameworks and Serving: TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, Triton Inference Server
• Feature Stores and Pipelines: Feast, Kubeflow, MLflow
• AI Systems Integration: Vector DBs (Pinecone, Milvus, Weaviate), RAG patterns, embeddings

Security and Compliance

• Auth and Identity: OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, JWT
• Secrets and KMS: HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS
• Compliance Awareness: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS
• AppSec: SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, SBOM

Reliability and Observability

• Monitoring and Tracing: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ELK/EFK
• Resilience: Circuit breakers, rate limiting, backoff, bulkheads, chaos engineering
• Performance: Profiling, load testing, capacity planning, autoscaling

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience including 3+ years at Staff or Principal level
• Proven success designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Strong skills in algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and performance tuning
• Experience leading architecture reviews and influencing large engineering teams
• Clear communication with executives, product, security, and cross-functional partners

Why Join

You will shape platform strategy, mentor engineers, and build systems that billions can rely on. You will work with state of the art enterprise technology to solve high impact backend challenges.

About Andiamo

Talent Partners for the AI Revolution. As a globally recognized staffing and consulting firm, we specialize in placing the top 2% of technology and go-to-market professionals with the world’s largest and most well-known companies.

For over 20 years, we've maintained the status of tier-one vendor for firms such as Palantir, Amazon, Fluidstack, Bloomberg, Relativity Space, Firefly, MasterCard, Visa, Two Sigma, Citadel, as well as other major financial services firms, elite hedge funds, Google-backed tech start-ups, and major software firms.

Our talent solutions include Permanent Placement, Contract Staffing, Executive Search, and Dedicated Recruiting Services (RPO). Find out more at www.andiamogo.com