Principal Software Engineer(Back End)

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.