Principal Backend Architect / Engineer (C#/.NET, Azure)

Principal Backend Architect / Engineer (C#/.NET, Azure)

Company: Polanov Tech Location: Remote — LATAM Commitment: Full-time Contract: Independent contractor Rate: USD $27–$30 per hour Role: Principal individual contributor

About the Role Polanov Tech is recruiting for a US-based software company with an engineering team of approximately 30 people.

We are looking for a hands-on Principal Backend Architect / Engineer to own backend architecture across a large monolith and a growing microservices platform. You will define technical direction across services, APIs, messaging and integrations while continuing to write production code.

You will report to the Lead/Principal Architect and collaborate with the Principal UI Architect and Data Architect.

Key Responsibilities

• Own backend architecture and lead the incremental decomposition of the monolith into well-defined services.
• Establish engineering standards, shared libraries, service templates and reusable platform capabilities.
• Design APIs and contracts with clear versioning and backward compatibility.
• Build reliable event-driven workflows using Azure Service Bus, including retries, idempotency, ordering and dead-letter recovery.
• Define customer and partner integrations with clear monitoring and recovery processes.
• Improve reliability, security, observability, query performance and cloud cost efficiency.
• Plan safe deployments, zero-downtime migrations and rollback strategies.
• Write production code, review critical pull requests, document architecture decisions and mentor engineers.
• Use agentic AI tools daily and help improve AI engineering practices across the team.

Required Experience

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including several years operating at Principal scope.
• Deep, current, hands-on C#/.NET expertise.
• Hands-on Azure experience, including Functions, Service Bus and Data Factory.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, CI/CD and DevOps practices.
• Proven ownership of incremental monolith decomposition.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, asynchronous processing, API design and production failure handling.
• Experience with observability, incident response, root-cause analysis and zero-downtime changes.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across multiple teams without formal management authority.
• Excellent written and spoken English.

Daily AI Use — Required You must use Claude Code or comparable agentic AI tools in your daily engineering work and have practical experience building agents, reusable skills, MCP servers or evaluations.

You should be able to explain your workflows, provide concrete examples and describe how you validate AI-generated work.

Principal-Level Ownership — Required This role requires recent, demonstrable ownership of significant architecture decisions across multiple teams, alongside continued involvement in implementation.

During the interview, you must be able to explain:

• A significant architecture decision you personally owned within the last three to four years, including alternatives, trade-offs, implementation and measurable results.
• How you gained adoption of a technical decision or standard without being the teams’ manager.
• How you use AI tools daily and what AI capabilities you have built.

How to Apply Submit your CV with a brief example of a recent architecture decision you owned and a description of your current daily AI workflow.