Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) is a global technology and professional services company delivering technology solutions and mission services to U.S. government, defense, and intelligence organizations. The Principal Software Engineer (Back End) will lead backend and full-stack engineering strategy, architecture, and technical excellence while designing scalable distributed systems, modernizing platforms, and mentoring engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization
- Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers
- Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence
- Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability
- Deliver new features and improvements to our core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination
- Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact
- Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load
- Identify opportunities to modernize our backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability
- Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality
- Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization
- Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives
- Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end – frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are your primary focus
Skills
- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, User Experience (UX), Web Development
- 10 + years of related experience
- Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact
- Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with high throughput and reliability requirements
- Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality
- Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns
- Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications
- Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks
- Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response
- Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Experience with data architecture including relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance
- Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (Java, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of language ecosystems and tooling
- Solid understanding of distributed systems principles including consistency models, consensus algorithms, failure modes, and reliability patterns
- Working knowledge of cloud engineering paradigms, asynchronous systems, service integration patterns, and event-driven architectures
- Experience with automated testing strategies including unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end system testing
- Practical knowledge of system performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost optimization
- Understanding of security principles including authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and secure coding practices
- Experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies
- Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and DevOps practices
- Demonstrated ability to design systems that balance consistency, availability, partition tolerance, performance, and cost
- Strong understanding of data architecture including database selection, schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization
- Experience with message brokers, event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, Event Bridge), and asynchronous processing patterns
- Ability to design for reliability including graceful degradation, circuit breakers, retry strategies, and disaster recovery
- Working knowledge of API design principles, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility patterns
- Understanding of system observability including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics aggregation, and alerting strategies
- Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale technical initiatives from vision to production, influencing outcomes across multiple teams
- Quality driven, sets the standard for excellence in communication, code, and documentation
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and strategic vision clearly to engineers, product managers, executives, and external stakeholders
- Proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers at all levels, building organizational backend engineering capability
- Recognized advocate for sound engineering practices who establishes patterns and influences engineering culture
- Comfort leading cross-functional initiatives, making architectural decisions with organizational impact, and navigating technical/business trade-offs at the principal level
- Must be a US Citizen and able to obtain and maintain Public Trust 6C
- Travel Required: Less than 10%
Benefits
- Medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts
- Dental plan options
- Vision plan
- 401(k) plan with the ability to contribute both pre- and post-tax dollars up to IRS annual limits and receive a company match
- Full flex work weeks where possible
- Vacation, sick, and personal time
- Paid holidays
- Paid parental leave
- Military leave
- Bereavement leave
- Jury duty leave
- 15 days of paid leave per calendar year for new employees, prorated based on date of hire
- 10 paid holidays per year, prorated based on date of hire
- Up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12-month period through the GDIT Paid Family Leave program for eligible employees
- Short- and long-term disability benefits
- Life insurance
- Accidental death and dismemberment insurance
- Personal accident insurance
- Critical illness insurance
- Business travel and accident insurance
- Remote work
Company Overview