Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Autodesk

Remote

Quick summary

Work type: Remote
Location: Remote
Salary: $139,000–$249,260 / yr
Posted: 48 days ago

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $195k

This role $194k

$126k most similar roles pay here $262k

This role pays less than 56% of similar roles. Most pay $174,037–$216,300 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $194k versus about $195k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Autodesk

Autodesk is a global leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, enabling users to imagine, design, and create a better world.

Autodesk currently has 44 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $139,000–$249,260 across 42 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Software Engineer - Backend

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As a Principal Software Engineer – Backend at Autodesk’s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) organization within the COO-GET Engineering group, you will lead technology direction for large-scale backend systems. Your day-to-day involves designing and building scalable services and APIs that operate at enterprise scale, guiding architectural decisions across multiple teams, and ensuring operational excellence through observability and incident response strategies. You must be proficient in AWS, cloud-native architectures, distributed systems design, and have a track record of influencing engineering outcomes without formal authority. Familiarity with data engineering concepts is beneficial, as you will work on complex system designs and mentor senior engineers while partnering closely with product leaders to solve business problems through technical solutions.

Skills

AWS Kubernetes Terraform Python Java Go Docker CI/CD Prometheus Grafana PostgreSQL Snowflake Apache Kafka Amazon Kinesis Git Jenkins Ansible JSON REST GraphQL

What you'll do

Provide technical leadership across multiple backend teams, shaping long-term architecture.
Design and evolve critical backend systems and APIs for scalability and reliability.
Lead the design of distributed, event-driven systems addressing consistency and failure handling.
Establish and enforce service standards including schema design and versioning strategies.
Mentor senior engineers and emerging leaders to raise technical standards across teams.

What we're looking for

10+ years of professional software engineering experience with expertise in backend and distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability to build and operate large-scale production backend services and APIs.
Strong hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures, including compute, storage, messaging, IAM, observability, and scaling patterns.
Proven track record of designing and owning mission-critical systems with long-term maintainability.
Deep understanding of distributed system design principles, such as asynchronous processing, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including API design, automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
Experience influencing architecture and engineering outcomes across multiple teams without formal authority.

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Hybrid

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