Principal Backend Architect - Scalable Distributed Systems (Los Angeles)

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 highthroughput 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 NoSQL 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 (Kubernetes, ECS), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and DevOps practices

System Design & Architecture

• Demonstrated ability to design systems that balance consistency, availability, partition tolerance, performance, and cost

• Strong understanding of data architecture including database selection, schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization

• Experience with message brokers, event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, EventBridge), and asynchronous processing patterns

• Ability to design for reliability including graceful degradation, circuit breakers, retry strategies, and disaster recovery

• Working knowledge of API design principles, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility patterns

• Understanding of system observability including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics aggregation, and alerting strategies

Leadership, Ownership, & Communication

• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale technical initiatives from vision to production, influencing outcomes across multiple teams

• Quality driven, sets the standard for excellence in communication, code, and documentation

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and strategic vision clearly to engineers, product managers, executives, and external stakeholders

• Proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers at all levels, building organizational backend engineering capability

• Recognized advocate for sound engineering practices who establishes patterns and influences engineering culture

• Comfort leading cross-functional initiatives, making architectural decisions with organizational impact, and navigating technical/business trade-offs at the principal level

Required • Must be a US Citizen and able to obtain and maintain Public Trust 6C

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