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

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

International job opportunity!!

USD 50/hr - Direct Hire

Remote — Brazil

Long-term, full-time

Required

• English – Advanced (written and spoken, customer-facing)
• 20+ Years Backend Engineering
• 15+ Years C# / .NET
• 8+ Years Microsoft Azure (Functions, Service Bus, Data Factory)
• 5+ Years Architecture or Technical Leadership
• Daily hands-on use of Agentic AI tooling — HARD REQUIREMENT

About the AI requirement: this is not "I have used ChatGPT". The client expects daily, hands-on work with agentic tooling such as Claude, Claude Code or equivalent, plus real experience building with AI: agents, reusable skills, MCP servers and evaluations. Candidates without this will not move forward.

Deep expertise in C#/.NET across secure, scalable and resilient commercial backend systems.

Hands-on Azure: Functions, Service Bus and Data Factory, plus PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and Snowflake, with solid CI/CD and DevOps practice.

Proven experience breaking down a large monolith incrementally, favouring safe and reversible steps over rewrites.

Strong background in event-driven and asynchronous architecture: ordering, idempotency, poison messages and dead-lettering.

Solid API and contract design experience, including versioning and backwards compatibility for internal teams, front-end and external integrators.

Strong instincts for data access at scale: query performance, zero-downtime migrations and messy customer data.

Production ownership: observability, alerting, incident response and root-cause analysis.

Nice to Have

• Experience partnering with dedicated Data and UI architects inside an established architecture function.
• Experience designing customer and partner integrations where failures are visible and recoverable.
• Track record of raising the AI capability of an engineering team, not just your own.
• Experience writing Architecture Decision Records and running technical office hours.

Description / Responsibilities

What They'll Do

• Own the backend architecture across all products and drive the incremental decomposition of the monolith into well-bounded services
• Set and enforce backend standards, best practices and tooling, and build shared platform capabilities (libraries, service templates, cross-cutting concerns)
• Own API and contract design, including versioning and backwards compatibility
• Own event-driven architecture on Azure Service Bus: delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency and failure handling
• Define how customer and partner integrations are built so failures are visible and recoverable
• Partner with the Data Architect on service data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns and query performance
• Improve reliability, security, observability and cloud cost efficiencyLead by example with AI-assisted engineering and help raise the AI capability of the wider team
• Mentor engineers, review key pull requests, run office hours and write Architecture Decision Records
• Participate in incident response, technical interviews, quarterly planning and occasional customer conversations

What We're Looking For

This is a senior individual contributor role. No direct reports, and you will keep writing code. You will report to the Lead/Principal Architect and work side by side with the Principal UI Architect and the Data Architect.

We are looking for a principal-level engineer who has already carried the weight of a business-critical backend: someone who has broken a monolith apart without breaking the business, who knows why a message ended up in the dead-letter queue at 2am, and who can defend an architecture decision to both an engineer and a customer.

You will have real ownership over the most critical part of the platform, a seat at the architecture table, and the chance to shape how a growing team builds, including how it uses AI day-to-day.

The client is highly selective. We are shortlisting a small number of top-tier profiles only.