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Our client is a US-based software company with an engineering team of around 30 people, working across a large monolith and a growing set of microservices. They already have dedicated architects for front-end and data, and they're now looking for someone to own the backend: the largest and most business-critical part of their platform.
As Principal Backend Architect, you'll define the architecture of the server-side estate (the monolith, services, APIs, messaging and integrations), set the standards the team follows, and stay hands-on enough to know whether those standards actually work in practice. You'll report to the Lead/Principal Architect and work side by side with the Principal UI Architect and the Data Architect.
This is a senior individual contributor role. No direct reports, and you'll keep writing code.
What you'll do
Own the backend architecture across all products and drive the incremental decomposition of the monolith into well-bounded services
Set and enforce backend standards, best practices and tooling, and build shared platform capabilities (libraries, service templates, cross-cutting concerns)
Own API and contract design, including versioning and backwards compatibility for internal teams, the front-end and external integrators
Own event-driven architecture on Azure Service Bus: delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency and failure handling
Define how customer and partner integrations are built so failures are visible and recoverable
Partner with the Data Architect on service data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns and query performance
Improve reliability, security, observability and cloud cost efficiency
Lead by example with AI-assisted engineering and help raise the AI capability of the wider team
Mentor engineers, review key pull requests, run office hours and write Architecture Decision Records
Participate in incident response, technical interviews, quarterly planning and occasional customer conversations