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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. Please highlight specific production examples of architectural decisions you've owned, large-scale backend transformations you've led, and how you've influenced engineering teams without formal authority. Only candidates who meet the principal-level requirements and can demonstrate the required experience will be presented to the client. Originally posted on Himalayas