Principal Software Engineer - Backend

Job Requisition ID # 26WD97363 Position Overview We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Backend to join Autodesk's Enterprise Data Management (EDM) organization within the COO-GET Engineering group. This is a senior individual contributor role operating at the Principal (P4) level, expected to drive technology direction for large, complex, and business-critical backend and distributed systems. This role is anchored in backend software engineering excellence: designing, building, and evolving scalable services, APIs, and event-driven systems that operate at enterprise scale. As a Principal Engineer, you will work with high autonomy and ambiguity, shape long-term architecture, and influence multiple teams and domains. Familiarity with data engineering concepts is valuable, but backend systems, service design, and distributed systems are the core competencies. You will function as a technical authority and force multiplier-guiding design decisions, setting standards, and ensuring Autodesk's core data services are reliable, resilient, and evolvable over time. Responsibilities Provide principal-level technical leadership across multiple backend and platform teams, shaping architecture and technical strategy beyond a single squad or service Author and evolve critical backend systems and APIs, ensuring they meet long-term scalability, reliability, and extensibility goals Lead design of distributed, event-driven systems, addressing consistency, ordering, failure handling, replay, idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure Establish and drive service and API standards across domains, including schema design, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and consumer experience Act as a technical decision-maker for cross-team initiatives; evaluate tradeoffs and make durable architectural choices aligned with business priorities Drive operational excellence across systems you influence: observability, alerting strategy, incident response, post-incident learning, and