Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. CD Baby is a globally recognized music technology company that provides artists with music distribution, payment, and audience insights. The Principal Software Engineer will lead back-end architecture and hands-on delivery for customer-facing platforms, guiding the migration from a .NET monolith to Python-based services and AWS while shipping customer value. The role also includes establishing engineering standards, collaborating cross-functionally, and mentoring engineers by example.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the multi-year roadmap that takes CD Baby’s customer-facing platform from a .NET monolith to Python-based services. Sequence the work so each phase delivers value on its own, build alignment around the plan across engineering and product, and revise it as we learn
- Find and design the service boundaries inside the monolith, aligned to the core domains of the product — distribution, royalties, analytics, catalog management, account. Define what each service owns and where its operational responsibilities begin and end. Getting these seams right is among the most consequential technical judgment in the role
- Establish schema-first API design as standard practice — service contracts defined in Protocol Buffers, with client and server code generated from those contracts, and gRPC as the transport for inter-service communication
- Set the strategic technology direction. Python and its ecosystem — Django, FastAPI, and the frameworks and libraries around them — are our primary investment for new services, with other languages (Go, Node.js, and others) reserved for where a specific service warrants it. .NET and SQL Server continue to power the platform through the transition. Define the Python service patterns the team will build against, and choose data stores that fit each workload rather than defaulting to a single relational store
- 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 on the pipelines that deliver platform data into Snowflake, keeping analytics and reporting first-class outputs of the models you design
- Write production code. This is a Principal IC role; your influence comes from the work as much as from the design
- Help carry our platform cloud migration across the finish line, ensuring the back end matches the quality of the front end work already underway
- Establish and uphold engineering standards — CI/CD, automated testing, observability, performance, security — across the back end. Set the bar by writing the code that defines it
- Run a continuous-delivery cadence: every product cycle on distribution, royalty splits, analytics, or catalog tooling is also an opportunity to modernize a slice of the stack. You’ll plan that interleaving with product and the team so the platform gets better every quarter while we keep shipping for customers
- Be the kind of senior engineer others learn from by watching. We believe engineering is learned through mentorship and apprenticeship. You will set the tone for back end craftsmanship on the team and bring engineers up by working alongside them
- Collaborate closely on a cross-functional engineering team that pairs back end engineering with front end, SDET, data engineering, design, and product management. Your day-to-day work happens here, with these people
- Partner across organizational boundaries with infrastructure, internal tools, and the broader data engineering org. The most consequential architectural decisions happen at those seams
Skills
- 10+ years of back end software engineering experience, including significant time in technical leadership roles — Principal, Staff, or equivalent IC
- Expert-level fluency in Python and its ecosystem (Django, FastAPI, or similar), with current production experience building services at scale
- Experience with schema-first API design using Protocol Buffers and gRPC for inter-service communication
- Demonstrated track record of decomposing a monolithic application into services in production, while keeping the product operational throughout
- Strong data modeling and ORM experience, including schema design, migrations, and the trade-offs between ORM convenience and query performance at scale
- Strong grasp of CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and running containerized services on a major cloud. We are migrating to AWS
- Our current stack is .NET (C#) and SQL Server, and it will be part of the platform through the transition. Prior .NET expertise is not required, but a willingness to work in it is
- Command of 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
- Comfort working inside an existing, valuable codebase rather than rewriting it
- Relentless focus on shipping customer value in tight cycles, including during architectural transitions
- You break large changes into safely deployable increments
- 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
- Ability to explain trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision — in writing, in design docs, and in person
- 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
- Relentless focus on translating technical investments into measurable artist value, with comfort working directly with customer data and feedback
- Remote within the United States
- This role works on Pacific Time hours to maintain strong overlap with the engineering team
- Music, media, or entertainment industry experience is welcome but not required — we will teach you the domain
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Life insurance
- 401(k) match
- Generous paid time off
Company Overview