Principal Software Engineer

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced principal engineer to join our team of smart and driven engineers who are building real-world solutions for the construction industry. Our team owns and operates customer-facing products and backend services that support critical workflows across Autodesk Forma. As a principal engineer on the team, you will lead the design and delivery of scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend systems. You will work on complex product and platform initiatives, including modernizing existing services, improving system architecture, and building new capabilities that support customer and business needs.

This is a full-stack product engineering team, with a strong emphasis on backend services, cloud infrastructure, APIs, and production operations. There are opportunities to collaborate closely with product, design, QA, architecture, and other engineering teams to understand customer problems early in the development cycle and shape the right technical solutions.This is an opportunity to be part of a learning and feedback-oriented culture, solve meaningful technical challenges, and make a measurable impact on products used by real customers.

Responsibilities

• Building, shipping, and maintaining product features and backend services in a cloud environment

• Driving API designs, database schemas, service boundaries, and architecture for distributed backend systems

• Leading complex technical projects that involve multiple stakeholders across engineering, product, design, QA, and other Autodesk teams

• Modernizing existing systems by improving reliability, scalability, maintainability, observability, and operational ownership

• Maintaining a high standard of code quality by promoting team best practices around automated testing, code reviews, design patterns, documentation, and production readiness

• Translating complex product and technical requirements into discrete engineering tasks with clear level-of-effort and timeline estimates

• Making practical technical trade-offs across customer needs, system complexity, performance, security, reliability, and delivery timelines

• Mentoring engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge sharing

• Communicating project status, identifying risks and blockers, and helping resolve the root cause of slowdowns with the rest of the team

• Participating in an on-call rotation to support systems in the production environment

Minimum Qualifications

• BS or MS in a technical field, or significant equivalent experience.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience

• Strong understanding of complex backend systems, distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and database design

• Experience designing and building production-level code with automated tests that is resilient, maintainable, and scalable

• Experience leading technical projects from design through delivery and production support

• Experience instrumenting code and services for monitoring, debugging, profiling, alerting, and operational visibility

• Ability to define, evolve, and interact with RESTful APIs

• Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially around technical concepts, architectural trade-offs, and project risks

• Cross-functional experience working with product managers, designers, QA engineers, architects, and engineering partners to keep projects on track

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building non-trivial backend services and APIs from the ground up

• Experience decomposing or modernizing legacy systems, monoliths, or shared services into clearer service boundaries

• Experience with JavaScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and AWS

• Experience with Docker and containerized development workflows

• Experience building or improving DevOps tooling to support backend services

• Familiarity with AWS tools such as SQS, RDS, EventBridge, ElastiCache, Lambda, ECS, CloudWatch, or related services

• Experience improving service reliability, performance, observability, security, or developer productivity

• Product engineering mindset and customer empathy to provide the right technical solution to real users’ problems with the right trade-offs

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments and drive clarity through technical leadership

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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!

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