Principal Software Engineer, Back End

Role Description

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to be the technical leader of back end engineering for CD Baby’s flagship customer-facing software: the member-facing application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the .com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority and informal mentorship responsibility — the kind of engineer who raises the team’s bar by example.

In the near term, you will help us complete a full platform migration from on-premises infrastructure to the Azure cloud — the foundation our customer experience will be built on for years to come. Beyond that milestone, your defining technical mandate is to lead the architectural evolution of our customer-facing stack from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture.

Equally important is the product mandate. CD Baby is a working software product that artists rely on daily. You will partner with a cross-functional agile team to deliver a steady cadence of new features and improvements — so every cycle of modernization is paired with real, shipped customer value.

This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of shipping software customers depend on every day, and the craft of redesigning the system underneath.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive back end software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion of it 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, while keeping the product operational throughout.
• Deep, current expertise in .NET (C#) and SQL Server, including operating them at scale in containerized environments on a major cloud (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience translates).
• Working fluency in at least one of Go, Node.js, or Python, and a clear point of view on when to reach for each.
• Comfort selecting and operating 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) and a 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, including versioning, evolution, and contract testing.
• 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, ideally including a modern warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
• Music, media, or entertainment industry experience is welcome but not required — we will teach you the domain.

Requirements

• Define and drive the multi-year architectural evolution of CD Baby’s customer-facing platform from a .NET monolith to a modular, service-based architecture with clean API contracts between front end and back end.
• Decompose the monolith into encapsulated services aligned to the core domains of the product — distribution, royalties, analytics, catalog management, account — with clear ownership, contracts, and operational boundaries.
• Choose the right language and the right data store for each service.
• Own the application data model end-to-end, setting ORM patterns, schema design, and data access conventions that the back end team operates by.
• Partner with Data Engineering to design data models and pipelines that flow cleanly into Snowflake.
• Write production code.
• Help carry our platform cloud migration across the finish line.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards — CI/CD, automated testing, observability, performance, security — across the back end.
• Run a continuous-delivery cadence.
• Be the kind of senior engineer others learn from by watching.
• Collaborate closely on a cross-functional Platform team.
• Partner across organizational boundaries with infrastructure, internal tools, and the broader data engineering org.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $180,000 – $205,000 annually.
• Comprehensive market-competitive total rewards program including medical, dental, and vision, life insurance, 401(k) match, and generous paid time off.

Location

Remote within the United States. This role works on Pacific Time hours to maintain strong overlap with the Platform team.

Reporting Structure

This role reports to the Director of Engineering.