Principal Backend Architect (C#/.NET, Azure)
Location: Remote from Latin America
Compensation: $45–$52 USD per hour
Engagement: Full-time international independent contractor
About Latino Legends
- Latino Legends connects exceptional Latin American talent with international companies building and scaling high-performing remote teams.
- We partner with companies across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia to match skilled professionals with opportunities where they can make a meaningful impact.
About the Role
- Our client is a US-based software company with an engineering team of approximately 30 people, supporting a large monolithic platform alongside a growing ecosystem of microservices.
- With dedicated architects for frontend and data, they are looking for a Principal Backend Architect / Engineer to take ownership of the backend architecture, the most extensive and business-critical part of their platform.
- In this role, you'll shape the architecture of the backend ecosystem, including the monolith, microservices, APIs, messaging infrastructure, and integrations.
- You'll establish engineering standards, guide the platform's evolution toward well-defined services, and remain hands-on with implementation to ensure architectural decisions translate into reliable, scalable production systems.
- You'll work closely with the Lead/Principal Architect, Principal UI Architect, and Data Architect to drive technical direction across the platform.
- This is a principal-level individual contributor role, ideal for an experienced engineer who combines architectural ownership with strong technical execution.
- There are no direct reports, and hands-on development remains a core part of the position.
Key Responsibilities
- Own backend architecture across the platform and lead the incremental decomposition of a large monolith into well-defined, maintainable services.
- Establish backend engineering standards, best practices, and tooling, including shared libraries, service templates, and cross-cutting platform capabilities.
- Lead API and contract design, ensuring effective versioning, backward compatibility, and reliable communication between internal services, frontend applications, and external integrations.
- Own event-driven architecture using Azure Service Bus, including message delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
- Define scalable patterns for customer and partner integrations, ensuring failures are observable, traceable, and recoverable.
- Collaborate with the Data Architect on data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns, and query performance.
- Improve platform reliability, security, observability, and cloud cost efficiency.
- Champion AI-assisted engineering practices and help expand the team's capabilities through practical adoption of AI tools and workflows.
- Mentor engineers, review critical pull requests, facilitate technical office hours, and document architectural decisions through Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
- Contribute to incident response, technical interviews, quarterly planning, and occasional customer-facing technical discussions.
Requirements
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including several years in architecture or technical leadership roles at the principal level.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in C# and .NET, with a proven track record of designing and delivering secure, scalable, and resilient commercial backend systems.
- Practical experience with Azure services, particularly Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Data Factory.
- Experience working with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.
- Demonstrated success incrementally decomposing large monolithic systems, prioritizing safe, reversible changes over disruptive rewrites.
- Strong understanding of event-driven and asynchronous architectures, including message ordering, idempotency, poison messages, retries, and dead-letter queues.
- Extensive experience with API design, service contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility.
- Strong data-access fundamentals, including query optimization, zero-downtime migrations, and handling inconsistent or complex customer data.
- Proven production ownership, including observability, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
- Required: Daily, hands-on use of AI development tools such as Claude, Claude Code, or comparable agentic engineering tools, along with practical experience building AI-powered solutions involving agents, reusable skills, MCP servers, or evaluations.
- Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A pragmatic engineering mindset, strong judgment, and a demonstrated ability to elevate the engineers and teams around you.
What We're Looking For
- This opportunity is specifically for a true Principal-level engineer, not simply a strong Senior Engineer.
- The ideal candidate has personally owned significant architectural decisions in production environments, influenced engineering practices across multiple teams, and successfully guided complex technical transformations without relying on formal management authority.
- Candidates must be able to provide concrete examples of architectural decisions they personally made, the trade-offs involved, and the measurable outcomes.
- Experience leading the incremental decomposition of a large monolith is particularly valuable.
- High-level architectural knowledge alone will not be sufficient.
- The client is highly selective and is looking for someone who can demonstrate both deep technical expertise and a clear record of architectural ownership while continuing to write production code.
Why Join?
- Real architectural ownership: Shape the backend architecture of a business-critical software platform.
- Technical influence: Help define engineering standards and guide technical decisions across multiple teams.
- Hands-on impact: Stay close to the code while leading complex architectural initiatives.
- AI-forward engineering: Help shape how a growing engineering organization integrates AI into its everyday development practices.
- Collaborative environment: Work alongside experienced architects and engineers who value thoughtful technical decisions and continuous improvement.
Engagement Details
- Full-time, remote independent contractor engagement.
- Compensation of $45–$50 USD per hour, depending on experience and fit.
- Timesheet submission is required.
- Days off, sick days, and local holidays are not billable.
- Working on local holidays may be possible by prior arrangement.
- Company hardware will be shipped to the selected candidate.
- The anticipated start date is approximately four weeks after the offer is signed.
Application Process
- Our recruitment team will carefully evaluate candidates' technical depth, architectural ownership, hands-on engineering experience, and practical use of AI development tools.
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