Principal Backend Software Developer

Position Overview

We are seeking a Principal Backend Software Developer to join our team working on Autodesk Construction Cloud Assets — a flagship product in Autodesk’s enterprise construction suite. Autodesk Construction Cloud is a connected construction management platform that empowers teams to collaborate, automate workflows, and make data-driven decisions across the entire project lifecycle. Assets, specifically, provides robust construction asset and equipment tracking, customizable workflows, and integrated field collaboration tools that help teams manage physical assets from specification through acceptance and handover.

In this role, you will be responsible for building, scaling, and maintaining frontend applications that power one of the most impactful products in the AEC industry, delivering mission-critical experiences for construction professionals around the world. You will have the opportunity to influence architecture, improve frontend quality and performance, and mentor other engineers as we elevate the way construction teams manage assets and equipment across global projects.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and evolve RESTful APIs and backend services using Node.js (Express) and Python (Flask) in high-scale, global environments
• Lead the development of scalable, resilient backend systems leveraging PostgreSQL, Redis, and cloud-native services
• Design and optimize asynchronous processing pipelines using AWS SQS/SNS and RabbitMQ
• Define and drive technical design discussions, ensuring systems are reliable, observable, and maintainable
• Establish best practices for clean, well-tested code, including comprehensive unit and integration testing strategies
• Collaborate cross-functionally to design and deliver features supporting asset creation, submission workflows, reporting, and field data management
• Guide database schema design and oversee migration strategies (e.g., Alembic)
• Improve system observability through instrumentation (OpenTelemetry), monitoring, and operational excellence practices
• Participate in and elevate code reviews, architectural reviews, and long-term technical planning
• Support production systems, contribute to incident response, and help mature operational processes
• Mentor engineers and provide architectural leadership across the team

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend and distributed systems
• Demonstrated experience architecting, scaling, and evolving production-grade services with high reliability and availability requirements
• Expert-level proficiency in Python (3.x) and modern Python development practices
• Strong production experience with Node.js and TypeScript, including strict typing in complex service architectures
• Extensive experience designing, building, and governing RESTful APIs using OpenAPI/Swagger and contract-driven development
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, performance optimization, and migration strategies
• Proven expertise in event-driven and message-based architectures (e.g., AWS SQS/SNS, Redis, RabbitMQ), including reliability patterns such as idempotency, retries, backoff, and failure handling
• Strong implementation experience with observability at scale, including distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics instrumentation, structured logging, and production diagnostics
• Experience designing and operating containerized workloads (Docker, Docker Compose) in production environments
• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, microservices architecture, scalability patterns, and data consistency trade-offs
• Experience driving engineering standards across teams, including testing strategy, CI/CD practices, feature flag governance, and secrets management (e.g., LaunchDarkly, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Demonstrated ability to lead architectural decisions, influence cross-team technical direction, and mentor senior engineers
• Proficiency with Git-based collaborative development in large codebases

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes orchestration and modern deployment strategies (e.g., blue/green, canary, progressive delivery)
• Experience designing multi-region architectures and supporting data residency requirements
• Experience defining API versioning strategies and maintaining backward compatibility
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, Spinnaker)
• Familiarity with Python tooling such as Poetry, py