Principal Backend Architect / Engineer (C#/.NET, Azure)

Principal Backend Architect / Engineer (C#/.NET, Azure)
Location: Remote — LATAM
Engagement: Full-time contractor
Reports to: Lead/Principal Architect
Role type: Senior individual contributor — hands-on, with no direct reports
About the role
Our client is a US-based software company with an engineering team of approximately 30 people, working across a large monolith and a growing set of microservices. With dedicated architects already leading front-end and data architecture, the company is looking for a Principal Backend Architect / Engineer to own the largest and most business-critical part of its platform.
You will define the architecture across the monolith, services, APIs, messaging, and integrations. You will establish engineering standards, build shared capabilities, and stay actively involved in implementation to ensure architectural decisions work in production.
Reporting to the Lead/Principal Architect, you will partner closely with the Principal UI Architect and Data Architect. This role combines architectural ownership, hands-on engineering, and technical mentorship.
What you’ll do
Own backend architecture across all products, guiding the incremental decomposition of the monolith into services with clear responsibilities and boundaries.
Define and uphold backend standards, best practices, and tooling. Build shared libraries, service templates, and reusable capabilities for common platform needs.
Own API and contract design, including versioning and backward compatibility for internal teams, front-end applications, and external integrators.
Lead event-driven architecture using Azure Service Bus, addressing delivery guarantees, message ordering, retries, idempotency, poison messages, and dead-letter handling.
Establish reliable patterns for customer and partner integrations, ensuring failures are visible, diagnosable, and recoverable.
Partner with the Data Architect on service data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns, and query performance.
Improve platform reliability, security, observability, and cloud cost efficiency.
Write production code and lead critical implementations, validating architectural decisions through hands-on delivery.
Model effective AI-assisted engineering and help the wider team develop practical skills in agentic tooling and AI-enabled development.
Mentor engineers, review key pull requests, run architecture office hours, and document decisions through Architecture Decision Records.
Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, technical interviews, quarterly planning, and occasional customer conversations.
What you’ll bring
10+ years of backend engineering experience, including several years in architecture or technical leadership roles.
A track record of designing and delivering secure, scalable, resilient commercial backend systems.
Deep C#/.NET expertise and continued hands-on involvement in production engineering.
Hands-on experience with Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Data Factory.
Practical experience with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and Snowflake, alongside CI/CD and DevOps practices.
Proven success decomposing a large monolith incrementally, prioritizing safe, reversible changes.
Strong expertise in asynchronous and event-driven architecture, including ordering, idempotency, retries, and failure recovery.
Solid API and contract design experience, with careful attention to compatibility and long-term maintainability.
Strong judgment around data access at scale, including query optimization, zero-downtime migrations, and inconsistent customer data.
Experience owning systems in production through observability, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
Daily hands-on use of AI tools such as Claude, Claude Code, or comparable agentic tooling, plus practical experience building agents, reusable skills, MCP servers, and evaluations. This is a hard requirement.
Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate clearly with engineers, business stakeholders, and customers.
A pragmatic approach to architecture and a demonstrated ability to improve the effectiveness of the engineers around you.
Why join
You will have ownership of the platform’s most critical systems, a meaningful voice in architecture decisions, and the opportunity to shape how a growing engineering team builds software.
This is a role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to write code, solve production problems, and help a team adopt AI effectively in its daily work.

Work arrangement
Yes