Principal Software Engineer

Job Requisition ID #

26WD97962

Position Overview
As a global leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, Autodesk helps people imagine, design and create a better world. Autodesk accelerates better design through an unparalleled depth of experience and a broad portfolio of software to give customers the power to solve their design, business, and environmental challenges. In addition to designers, architects, engineers, and media and entertainment professionals, Autodesk helps students, educators, and casual creators unlock their creative ideas through user-friendly applications. Autodesk's Digital Experience Engineering team is building the next-generation Content Platform. This is a headless, source-agnostic content pipeline that ingests, normalizes, versions, and delivers content powering experiences used by millions of customers worldwide.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to provide deep technical leadership on this platform and to translate complex content, delivery, and orchestration requirements into a coherent, scalable architecture. As a Principal Engineer on the Content Platform, you will be a recognized subject-matter expert on distributed orchestration, schema-driven data pipelines, and high-throughput content delivery on AWS. You will own architecture decisions that span multiple repositories and you will partner with product, architecture, and partner engineering teams to shape the platform's roadmap. You will report to a Software Development Manager and this is a hybrid work mode.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the Content Platform's core subsystems and drive architectural alignment across the multi-repo workspace
• Translate ambiguous product and partner requirements into concrete platform capabilities, schema extensions, and workflow patterns, and document the tradeoffs for engineering and product leadership
• Design and review complex changes to the workflow framework (BaseWorkflow, APIWorkflow, annotation-driven fan-out, registries) and the single-table DynamoDB model, ensuring correctness under concurrency, versioning, and locale semantics
• Lead cross-team initiatives that span ingestion, workflow orchestration, delivery, and content modeling; identify and resolve systemic issues in reliability, performance, and developer productivity
• Establish and evolve engineering standards for the platform and coach engineers across teams to adopt them Partner with senior leaders, architects, DevOps, Support, and product organizations to advise on platform strategy, capacity planning, and incident response
• Serve as the escalation point for the most complex technical problems.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and architecture deep dives, raising the technical bar across the team

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of professional software development experience, including significant time at a senior or staff level designing and operating distributed backend systems in production
• Deep proficiency in Python, including experience designing libraries and frameworks consumed by other engineering teams
• Hands-on experience designing and operating workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Cadence, Airflow, Step Functions, or equivalent) at production scale
• Strong expertise with AWS, including Lambda, DynamoDB (single-table design and GSIs), S3, and event-driven integrations Expertise in REST API design and implementation with frameworks such as FastAPI, including schema validation, versioning, and backwards compatibility
• Demonstrated ability to design data models and schemas and to drive system behavior from declarative configuration
• Track record of leading architecture and design across multiple teams or repositories, and of influencing technical direction through written design docs and stakeholder communication

• Experience building headless CMS, content delivery, or large-scale content ingestion platforms, including integration with third-party CMSs such as Contentful
• Familiarity with immutable versioning, locale-per-item modeling, and hot-path delivery optimization on DynamoDB or similar NoSQL stores
• Experience with plugin/connector frameworks and source-agnostic ingestion patterns (acquire → extract → transform → deliver)
• Background in developer experience and platform tooling: uv, internal package registries, monorepo or multi-repo developer workflows
• Experience operating regulated or multi-region environments (e.g., FedRAMP sync, cross-region replication, compliance-driven data handling)
• Exposure to AI/ML-driven content workflows, including embeddings, search relevance, or content enrichment pipelines
• Advanced expert role, requiring deep subject-matter knowledge and sound business acumen to advise leaders
• For jobs at this level, knowledge of the business starts to become as important as subject-matter knowledge
• Incumbents translate specialized subject-matter requirements into business needs/requirements
• Require depth of specialized expertise to interpret internal/external business issues and recommend best practices to address them
• Solve complex problems that require in-depth evaluation of variable factors by taking a broad perspective to identify the best approach and innovative solutions
• Work independently, with close guidance in only the most complex or unusual situations
• Adapt communication style to persuade various stakeholders across the business and frequently interact with senior leaders to provide advice and SME
• May lead functional teams or programs within own function (or closely related functions)