Principal Engineer & Technical Lead — Azure / Containers

Aperia•Dallas, TX

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

Aperia Solutions is hiring a hands-on Principal Engineer and Technical Lead to drive technical execution for a regulated, multi-tenant payments SaaS platform built on Azure, Microsoft Fabric, AKS, C#/.NET, and Python. Reporting directly to the SVP of Technology, this person will serve as the senior hands-on technical authority across platform, data, and AI initiatives. The role combines deep architecture and enterprise design-pattern expertise with substantial production coding and implementation work. The position focuses on turning target-state architecture into production systems: proving risky ideas through working prototypes, owning technically challenging implementation work, authoring infrastructure as code and delivery pipelines, and addressing production issues. The engineer will challenge designs with implementation evidence, lead technical reviews across distributed teams, and help maintain a high standard for quality, security, observability, and cost effectiveness. Work is divided approximately 50% across hands-on engineering and prototypes, 25% across design and implementation patterns, and 25% across technical leadership with delivery teams. The work includes Azure services and Microsoft Fabric integrations, regulated-workload controls, enterprise messaging and resilience patterns, and AI-related prototypes and features. The role is hybrid, Monday to Friday, and located in Dallas, Texas.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years as a lead or principal engineer shipping production cloud systems.
4+ years building and operating containerized workloads on Kubernetes in production, preferably AKS.
Deep, current hands-on Azure experience, including personally building, deploying, and debugging relevant services.
Substantial, active C#/.NET and Python work within the last 12 months, with continued strength as an individual contributor.
Applied command of enterprise design patterns, including messaging, resilience, integration, and multi-tenancy, with understanding of production failure modes.
Track record of taking a novel concept from whiteboard to working proof of concept within weeks and then building or leading the first production slice.
Working architecture depth across operational and analytical data stores, including event-driven and streaming implementations.
Fluency with infrastructure as code and CI/CD, including writing Terraform and pipelines.
Security-first implementation experience in a regulated environment such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, or equivalent financial services.
Ability to lead distributed and offshore teams through design and code reviews without direct authority.
Clear written communication, including ADRs, design documents, and status summaries.
Willingness to submit to a background investigation and drug test as part of the selection process.

Nice To Haves

Payments, card processing, risk/fraud, or merchant services domain experience.
Production Microsoft Fabric experience, including mirroring from Cosmos DB or SQL and Fabric capacity sizing.
Experience shipping LLM-backed features, including RAG, agent/tool patterns, content safety, evaluation, and red-teaming.
Multi-tenant SaaS design experience, including tenant isolation, noisy-neighbor controls, and per-tenant cost attribution.
Azure Developer (AZ-204), DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400), CKAD/CKA, or Fabric Analytics Engineer (DP-600) certifications.
Open-source contributions, technical writing, or conference talks.

Responsibilities

Build prototypes and proofs of concept for advanced concepts such as LLM/RAG services, event-driven pipelines, multi-tenant patterns, and Azure services to reduce technical risk.
Own technically challenging work end to end, including writing and shipping production-quality C#/.NET and Python, debugging production issues, and unblocking teams through direct implementation.
Implement enterprise design patterns in production code, including event-driven messaging, outbox and saga patterns, idempotent consumers, retries, dead-lettering, CQRS, resilience, caching, and multi-tenant isolation.
Author and review Terraform or Bicep, Helm charts, and CI/CD pipelines; create reusable golden-path templates.
Benchmark and load test designs, using measurements to inform technical decisions.
Perform technical spikes, vendor evaluations, migration tooling, and performance and cost investigations assigned by the SVP.
Translate target-state architectures into implementation designs for service boundaries, contracts, data models, and deployment topology across Azure services.
Build and harden integration paths into Microsoft Fabric, including OneLake, Lakehouse/Warehouse, mirroring, and Real-Time Intelligence.
Write ADRs and design documents, and contribute implementation-level detail to architecture reviews and threat models.
Implement regulated-workload controls in code and IaC, including network isolation, private endpoints, identity, secrets, encryption, and audit.
Estimate run costs before building, measure costs afterward, and identify designs that may not scale economically.
Carry technical decisions into delivery teams, maintain alignment with approved designs, and represent the SVP on technical matters when unavailable.
Run design reviews, code reviews, and technical checkpoints with onshore and offshore teams across time zones.
Track technical status and raise risks early, including integration gaps, design drift, quality issues, and security debt.
Mentor senior engineers and technical leads and improve implementation quality, testing, and observability.
Communicate implementation status and risks as concise options for technology leadership, and work directly with security, product, and vendors.