Principal Engineer & Technical Lead — Azure / Containers

Aperia•Dallas, TX

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Aperia Solutions is hiring a hands-on Principal Engineer and Technical Lead to execute technical work across its regulated, multi-tenant payments SaaS platform. The platform uses 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 and as the SVP’s chief lieutenant on technical execution. The role is responsible for turning target architecture into production systems, validating risky ideas with working prototypes, handling difficult implementation and production problems, and maintaining a high technical bar across distributed engineering teams. This is not an architecture-only or slideware role; it requires substantial coding and infrastructure work. The position is approximately 50% hands-on engineering and prototyping, 25% design and implementation patterns, and 25% technical leadership with delivery teams. Work includes developing production-quality C#/.NET and Python, building proofs of concept, authoring infrastructure as code and delivery pipelines, designing and implementing cloud services and data integrations, and documenting implementation decisions. The role also leads design and code reviews, mentors engineers, tracks technical risks, and communicates implementation status and options to technology leadership. The broader company is modernizing its platform, including developing a risk analysis and scoring platform on Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered ingestion platform, and AI-native applications. Aperia operates under PCI DSS 4.0 across on-premises datacenters in Allen, Texas and Chicago, Illinois, as well as Azure cloud.

Requirements

At least 12 years of software engineering experience, including at least 5 years as a lead or principal engineer shipping production cloud systems.
At least 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 the services used.
Substantial, active C#/.NET and Python work in the last 12 months, beyond code reviews.
Strong individual-contributor ability and willingness to perform hands-on engineering work.
Applied command of enterprise design patterns for messaging, resilience, integration, and multi-tenancy, including knowledge of production failure modes.
Experience taking a novel concept from whiteboard to working proof of concept in weeks, 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 pipeline implementations.
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 working prototypes and proofs of concept for concepts such as LLM/RAG services, event-driven pipelines, multi-tenant patterns, and Azure services to reduce technical risk.
Own difficult technical 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 infrastructure as code, Helm charts, and CI/CD pipelines, and build reusable golden-path templates.
Benchmark and load-test candidate designs and use measured results to inform technical decisions.
Conduct technical spikes, hands-on vendor evaluations, migration tooling work, and performance and cost investigations.
Translate target-state architectures into implementation designs covering service boundaries, contracts, data models, and deployment topology across Azure services and Microsoft Fabric.
Build and harden integrations with Microsoft Fabric, including OneLake, Lakehouse/Warehouse, mirroring, and Real-Time Intelligence.
Write architecture decision records and design documents and contribute implementation-level detail to architecture reviews and threat models.
Implement regulated-workload controls in code and infrastructure, including network isolation, private endpoints, identity, secrets, encryption, and audit.
Estimate and measure run costs 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 needed.
Run design reviews, code reviews, and technical checkpoints with onshore and offshore teams across time zones.
Track technical status and surface risks such as 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 with security, product, and vendors.