Principal Backend Engineer

Feathr•Gainesville, FL

1d•$145,000 - $165,000•Remote

About The Position

Feathr's SaaS platform is a critical component of the value we deliver to our clients. As a Principal Backend Software Engineer, you shape the technical direction of the systems that meet the advertising, marketing, and analytics needs of our diverse customer base. You operate across teams and time horizons—identifying systemic risks before they become incidents, driving architectural decisions that compound over years, and raising the bar for engineering quality across the organization. You balance hands-on technical work with strategic influence, and your judgment is trusted to make the right tradeoffs when the path forward is ambiguous.

Requirements

6+ years of backend software engineering experience
4+ years designing and operating distributed software systems at scale
Track record of leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or services
Deep expertise in Python, Flask, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Redis
Experience defining and evolving engineering standards, practices, and tooling for an organization
Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor); we use these daily and consider them core to our workflow
Design and evaluate system architectures with a focus on reliability, scalability, and operational cost
Deep knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and their practical performance characteristics
Expert-level proficiency with Elasticsearch—schema design, query optimization, cluster operations, and scaling strategies
Expert-level proficiency with MongoDB—data modeling, aggregation pipelines, indexing strategies, and operational maintenance at scale
Comprehensive knowledge of AWS infrastructure and services (EC2, EKS, SQS, S3, and beyond)
Design and maintain event-driven architectures and data ingestion pipelines across diverse sources
Strong understanding of security, compliance, and data governance in enterprise SaaS environments
Define testing strategies that balance coverage, speed, and maintainability across a multi-service codebase
Identify and drive adoption of AI-assisted development practices that meaningfully improve team velocity and code quality
Pragmatic and customer-oriented—you build software to help customers solve real problems, and you help others do the same
A systems thinker who sees how individual decisions compound across a codebase, a team, and an organization
Decisive under ambiguity; you make sound technical calls with incomplete information and adjust when new facts emerge
Exceptional communicator; you translate between business strategy and technical architecture fluently
A force multiplier—you make every engineer around you more effective through mentorship, code review, design feedback, and tooling
Opinionated but open-minded; you advocate strongly for your position and change your mind when presented with better evidence
Patient with people, impatient with systemic problems; you invest in long-term fixes over recurring workarounds
Service-oriented; you build sustainable systems and sustainable teams

Nice To Haves

Experience with Docker, self-hosted Drone CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, programmatic advertising platforms, or capacity planning

Responsibilities

Drive architectural decisions that affect the platform's reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability
Design and implement high-impact backend features and services, particularly when the problem space is novel or ambiguous
Identify systemic technical risks and lead efforts to address them before they become critical
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and direct feedback
Collaborate with engineering leadership, product managers, and stakeholders to align technical strategy with business goals
Set and raise the bar for code quality, testing practices, and operational excellence
Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions, new technologies, and architectural patterns for the team
Debug the hardest production issues—the ones that cross service boundaries and resist simple explanations
Ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of Feathr's data and operations