Principal Backend & Workflow Architect

We are seeking a senior engineering leader to architect and scale mission-critical backend platforms that support complex, data-intensive, long-running business processes. This role blends hands-on system design with cross-functional leadership, ensuring reliability, data integrity, and scalable distributed architecture.
You will own the design and evolution of stateful workflow systems and the underlying data models that power them. Working closely with product, data, infrastructure, and platform teams, you will translate business requirements into resilient, production-ready systems that operate reliably under growth and change.

Key Responsibilities
Workflow & Distributed Systems Architecture

• Design and implement orchestrated, long-running workflow systems (including sagas, asynchronous processing, and event-driven patterns).
  
  
• Build scalable backend services and APIs emphasizing correctness, durability, and maintainability.
  
  
• Define service boundaries, data ownership models, and consistency strategies across distributed systems.
  
  
• Engineer fault-tolerant workflows with retries, idempotency, compensation logic, and failure recovery.
  
  
• Ensure high observability through structured logging, metrics, and tracing.
  
  
• Establish reliability targets (SLAs/SLOs) and lead post-incident reviews and systemic improvements.

Data & Persistence Engineering

• Own relational database architecture (PostgreSQL/MySQL), including schema design, indexing strategy, migrations, and performance optimization.
  
  
• Design and execute complex data transformations to support evolving product capabilities.
  
  
• Safeguard transactional integrity and backward-compatible schema evolution.
  
  
• Partner with analytics and data teams to ensure alignment between operational and reporting data models.

Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence

• Provide architectural direction and hands-on implementation across backend systems.
  
  
• Lead design reviews and uphold engineering standards across teams.
  
  
• Mentor engineers through technical coaching, code reviews, and collaborative design sessions.
  
  
• Develop shared libraries, internal frameworks, and tooling to increase development velocity.
  
  
• Improve developer experience across testing, deployment, and local workflows.
  
  
• Produce clear architectural documentation and operational runbooks.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated architectural leadership.
  
  
• Extensive experience designing distributed, long-running workflow systems.
  
  
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL or MySQL, including advanced schema design and performance tuning.
  
  
• Strong experience building data-heavy systems and executing complex database transformations.
  
  
• Proficiency in backend technologies such as C#/.NET, TypeScript, Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, or comparable languages.
  
  
• Experience operating production services with strong reliability and scalability requirements.
  
  
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and ability to drive technical alignment.
  
  
• Excellent system design, debugging, and analytical problem-solving abilities.

Salary: $165,000-$175,000/year

Compensation is based on a range of factors that include relevant experience, knowledge, skills, other job-related qualifications.