Principal Software Engineer

Autodesk•Atlanta, GA

2d•$139,000 - $249,260•Hybrid

About The Position

As a global leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, Autodesk helps people imagine, design and create a better world. Autodesk accelerates better design through an unparalleled depth of experience and a broad portfolio of software to give customers the power to solve their design, business, and environmental challenges. In addition to designers, architects, engineers, and media and entertainment professionals, Autodesk helps students, educators, and casual creators unlock their creative ideas through user-friendly applications. Autodesk’s Digital Experience Engineering team builds the platforms behind the digital experiences that millions of customers use worldwide. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to provide deep technical leadership on a large-scale data platform, and to turn complex requirements into a coherent, scalable architecture. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a recognized technical expert on distributed systems, data pipelines, and high-throughput services in the cloud. You will own architecture decisions that span multiple systems and teams. You will partner with product, architecture, and engineering groups to shape the platform roadmap. You will report to a Software Development Manager and this is a hybrid work mode.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of professional software development experience, including significant time designing and operating distributed backend systems in production.
Strong proficiency in a modern backend language, and experience building libraries or frameworks used by other engineering teams.
Experience designing and operating asynchronous or workflow-based systems at production scale.
Strong experience with a major public cloud platform, including serverless compute, NoSQL storage, object storage, and event-driven integration.
Expertise in API design and implementation, including schema validation, versioning, and backwards compatibility.
Demonstrated ability to design data models and to drive system behavior from configuration.
Track record of leading architecture across multiple teams, and of influencing technical direction through written design documents.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ETL or data pipeline platforms that ingest, transform, and deliver data at scale.
Strong data management background, including schema design, versioning, and data quality.
Experience with extensible integration patterns, such as plugin or connector frameworks for heterogeneous sources.
Background in developer experience and platform tooling.
Experience operating regulated or multi-region environments.
Exposure to AI/ML-driven workflows, such as embeddings, search relevance, or data enrichment.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for core platform subsystems and drive architectural alignment across teams and codebases.
Turn ambiguous product and partner requirements into concrete platform capabilities, and document the tradeoffs for engineering and product leadership.
Design and review complex changes to distributed services and data models, with attention to correctness, concurrency, and data integrity.
Lead cross-team initiatives, and identify and resolve systemic issues in reliability, performance, and developer productivity.
Establish and evolve engineering standards, and coach engineers across teams to adopt them Partner with senior leaders, architects, DevOps, Support, and product organizations on platform strategy, capacity planning, and incident response.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and architecture deep dives.