Principal Software Engineer, Back End

CD Baby•Los Angeles, NY

7d•Remote

About The Position

CD Baby is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead back-end engineering for their flagship customer-facing software. This role involves technical leadership, informal mentorship, and hands-on contribution. Key responsibilities include leading a platform migration to Azure cloud and architecting the evolution of the customer-facing stack from a .NET monolith to a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture. The role also requires partnering with a cross-functional agile team to deliver new features and improvements, balancing modernization with shipped customer value.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive back end software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion of it in deep technical leadership roles — Principal, Staff, or equivalent IC.
Demonstrated track record of leading the decomposition of a monolithic application into a service-based architecture in production, while keeping the product operational throughout.
Deep, current expertise in .NET (C#) and SQL Server, including operating them at scale in containerized environments on a major cloud (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience translates).
Working fluency in at least one of Go, Node.js, or Python, and a clear point of view on when to reach for each.
Comfort selecting and operating data stores beyond a single relational default (e.g., Postgres, key-value, document, search, columnar) based on the workload.
Strong experience with ORMs (Entity Framework, Dapper, or equivalents in other ecosystems) and a clear point of view on schema design, data modeling, migrations, and the trade-offs between ORM convenience and query performance at scale.
Hands-on experience designing API contracts (REST, GraphQL, gRPC — and the trade-offs among them) between front end and back end teams, including versioning, evolution, and contract testing.
Strong grasp of CI/CD, automated testing strategies, observability, and the operational disciplines that make continuous delivery safe at scale.
Experience partnering with data engineering on analytical pipelines, ideally including a modern warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
Technical Authority: Deep expertise across modern back end architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, and cloud platforms. Ability to make and defend architectural decisions, and equally to change your mind when the evidence warrants.
Pragmatic Modernization: Comfort working inside an existing, valuable codebase rather than rewriting it. You see legacy systems as a starting point with real customer value, not an obstacle.
Bias for Shipping: Relentless focus on shipping customer value in tight cycles, including during architectural transitions. You break large changes into safely deployable increments.
Mentorship by Example: You raise the people around you through the quality of your work, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with another engineer to solve a hard problem.
Clear Communication: Ability to explain trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision — in writing, in design docs, and in person.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: You partner naturally with product, design, data, QA, and infrastructure, and you treat those partnerships as core to the engineering work, not adjacent to it.
Customer-Centric Mindset: Relentless focus on translating technical investments into measurable artist value, with comfort working directly with customer data and feedback.

Nice To Haves

Music, media, or entertainment industry experience is welcome but not required — we will teach you the domain.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the multi-year architectural evolution of CD Baby’s customer-facing platform from a .NET monolith to a modular, service-based architecture with clean API contracts between front end and back end.
Decompose the monolith into encapsulated services aligned to the core domains of the product — distribution, royalties, analytics, catalog management, account — with clear ownership, contracts, and operational boundaries.
Choose the right language and the right data store for each service.
Own the application data model end-to-end, setting ORM patterns, schema design, and data access conventions that the back end team operates by.
Partner with Data Engineering to design data models and pipelines that flow cleanly into Snowflake, so analytics and reporting are first-class outputs of the platform.
Write production code, influencing through work as much as design.
Help carry the platform cloud migration across the finish line, ensuring the back end matches the quality of the front end work.
Establish and uphold engineering standards — CI/CD, automated testing, observability, performance, security — across the back end.
Run a continuous-delivery cadence, interleaving modernization with shipping customer value.
Be a senior engineer others learn from by watching, setting the tone for back end craftsmanship.
Bring engineers up by working alongside them.
Collaborate closely on a cross-functional Platform team with front end, SDET, data engineering, design, and product management.
Partner across organizational boundaries with infrastructure, internal tools, and the broader data engineering org.