Principal Backend Software Developer

Position Overview

Autodesk is transforming how customers access, consume, and pay for the products that help them design and make the world around us. We are building a next-generation usage-based billing platform that will power Autodesk’s consumption-based business model at global scale.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead the architecture, execution, and operational excellence of this platform. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who has built and operated distributed systems in production, understands the trade-offs behind scalable architecture, and wants to solve business-critical problems with deep technical rigor.
You will work on real-time, event-driven systems that process product usage, support billing workflows, and enable reliable customer experiences across Autodesk’s global portfolio. You will influence system design, technical strategy, engineering practices, and cross-team execution while remaining close to the code.
This is not a narrow feature-delivery role. It is an opportunity to shape a foundational commerce platform for Autodesk, raise the engineering bar, and help build systems where correctness, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and operability all matter.

Why Join Us
At Autodesk, platform teams are expected to drive measurable outcomes, reduce friction for product teams, and enable stronger execution across the portfolios. In this role, you will:
Work on a business-critical platform that directly enables Autodesk’s shift toward consumption-based models.
Design and operate high-scale distributed systems where correctness and reliability are essential.
Own problems end to end, from architecture and implementation through production operations and continuous improvement.
Collaborate with product, finance, commerce, platform, data, and engineering teams across Autodesk.
Use modern cloud-native architecture, event-driven patterns, observability, and Agentic engineering practices to move faster without compromising quality.
Mentor strong engineers and influence technical direction beyond your immediate team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of secure, scalable, maintainable backend systems for Autodesk’s global usage-based billing platform.
• Build and optimize distributed services, event-driven workflows, APIs, and data-processing pipelines that support real-time usage capture, rating, billing, reconciliation, and downstream integrations.
• Write high-quality, secure, testable production code in Java, Python, Go, or similar languages.
• Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly to improve engineering velocity, code quality, testing, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Own critical service-level outcomes, including SLOs, SLIs, observability, alerting, resilience, incident readiness, and post-incident improvements.
• Drive technical design reviews, code reviews, architecture documents, and operational readiness reviews.
• Identify and resolve complex performance, scalability, correctness, reliability, and cost-efficiency challenges.
• Partner with product managers, engineering managers, architects, finance systems, commerce teams, and other platform teams to translate business goals into durable technical solutions.
• Contribute to the technical roadmap, including platform modernization, technical debt reduction, migration strategy, and long-term architectural direction.
• Improve engineering practices across the team, including testing strategy, release safety, deployment automation, security posture, and production support.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, helping the team make better architectural decisions and operate more effectively.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong backend engineering experience building and operating production services at scale.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, real-time or near-real-time data processing, and cloud-native design.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Java, Python, Go, Kotlin, or similar.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services such as Lambda, Fargate, ECS, SQS, SNS,
• DynamoDB, Aurora, API Gateway, CloudWatch, or related cloud technologies.
• Proven ability to design systems for high availability, low latency, fault tolerance, data consistency, and multi-region resilience.
• Experience owning production systems, including observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to make pragmatic trade-offs across architecture, delivery speed, operational risk, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and act as a technical multiplier.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building billing, payments, metering, usage, commerce, financial systems, or other correctness-critical platforms.
• Experience with high-throughput streaming or messaging systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Streaming, SQS, or similar.
• Experience designing idempotent, auditable, and eventually consistent systems.
• Experience with data modeling for transactional, analytical, and event-sourced systems.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated testing, progressive delivery, and deployment safety.
• Experience leading large technical initiatives across multiple teams or organizations.
• Experience migrating legacy systems to modern cloud-native platforms.
• Background in cost optimization for large-scale cloud systems.

Learn More

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Salary transparency

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For Canada based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $131,000 and $191,400. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Belonging
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