Principal Software Engineer

About the role

The Principal Software Engineer will lead the technical direction for the Content Platform's core subsystems, translating complex content, delivery, and orchestration requirements into a coherent, scalable architecture. The role involves working with product, architecture, and partner engineering teams to shape the platform's roadmap, while also mentoring senior and mid-level engineers.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the Content Platform's core subsystems and drive architectural alignment across the multi-repo workspace
• Translate ambiguous product and partner requirements into concrete platform capabilities, schema extensions, and workflow patterns, and document the tradeoffs for engineering and product leadership
• Design and review complex changes to the workflow framework (BaseWorkflow, APIWorkflow, annotation-driven fan-out, registries) and the single-table DynamoDB model, ensuring correctness under concurrency, versioning, and locale semantics
• Lead cross-team initiatives that span ingestion, workflow orchestration, delivery, and content modeling; identify and resolve systemic issues in reliability, performance, and developer productivity
• Establish and evolve engineering standards for the platform and coach engineers across teams to adopt them
• Partner with senior leaders, architects, DevOps, Support, and product organizations to advise on platform strategy, capacity planning, and incident response
• Serve as the escalation point for the most complex technical problems
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and architecture deep dives, raising the technical bar across the team

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 at a senior or staff level designing and operating distributed backend systems in production
• Deep proficiency in Python, including experience designing libraries and frameworks consumed by other engineering teams
• Hands-on experience designing and operating workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Cadence, Airflow, Step Functions, or equivalent) at production scale
• Strong expertise with AWS, including Lambda, DynamoDB (single-table design and GSIs), S3, and event-driven integrations
• Expertise in REST API design and implementation with frameworks such as FastAPI, including schema validation, versioning, and backwards compatibility
• Demonstrated ability to design data models and schemas and to drive system behavior from declarative configuration
• Track record of leading architecture and design across multiple teams or repositories, and of influencing technical direction through written design docs and stakeholder communication

Qualifications

• Experience building headless CMS, content delivery, or large-scale content ingestion platforms, including integration with third-party CMSs such as Contentful
• Familiarity with immutable versioning, locale-per-item modeling, and hot-path delivery optimization on DynamoDB or similar NoSQL stores
• Experience with plugin/connector frameworks and source-agnostic ingestion patterns (acquire → extract → transform → deliver)
• Background in developer experience and platform tooling: uv, internal package registries, monorepo or multi-repo developer workflows
• Experience operating regulated or multi-region environments (e.g., FedRAMP sync, cross-region replication, compliance-driven data handling)
• Exposure to AI/ML-driven content workflows, including embeddings, search relevance, or content enrichment pipelines
• Advanced expert role, requiring deep subject-matter knowledge and sound business acumen to advise leaders

Skills

• Experience with distributed backend systems in production
• Proficiency in Python and its ecosystem
• Experience with workflow orchestration systems like Temporal, Cadence, Airflow, Step Functions, or similar
• Strong understanding of AWS services, particularly Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and event-driven integrations
• Expertise in REST API design and implementation
• Experience with immutable versioning, locale-per-item modeling, and hot-path delivery optimization on DynamoDB or similar NoSQL stores
• Experience with plugin/connector frameworks and source-agnostic ingestion patterns
• Experience operating regulated or multi-region environments
• Experience with AI/ML-driven content workflows

Benefits

Autodesk offers a comprehensive benefits package, including health and financial benefits, time away, and everyday wellness. For U.S.-based roles, the starting base salary ranges from $139,000 to $249,260, with offers based on experience and geographic location. Additional compensation includes annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a benefits package.

Pay

Salary is one part of Autodesk's competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $139,000 and $249,260. Offers are based on the candidate's experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range.

Schedule

This is a hybrid work mode.