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Principal Software Engineer, Back End

Los Angeles, CA; Nashville, TN; New York City, NY; Portland, OR; Remote

Principal Software Engineer, Back End

CD Baby — Platform Team

About Us

CD Baby is a globally recognized leader in the music industry and the first platform to offer artists direct distribution to their fans. Our technology organization has a deep history and a strong foundation, built by long-tenured, dedicated professionals. As we navigate the next era of music technology, we are committed to modernizing our core systems, fostering an agile culture, and leveraging cutting-edge platforms to better serve our artists, partners, and fans worldwide.

The Role

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to be the technical leader of back end engineering for CD Baby’s flagship customer-facing software: the member-facing application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the .com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority and informal mentorship responsibility — the kind of engineer who raises the team’s bar by example.

In the near term, you will help us complete a full platform migration from on-premises infrastructure to the Azure cloud — the foundation our customer experience will be built on for years to come. Beyond that milestone, your defining technical mandate is to lead the architectural evolution of our customer-facing stack from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture.

Equally important is the product mandate. CD Baby is a working software product that artists rely on daily. You will partner with a cross-functional agile team to deliver a steady cadence of new features and improvements — so every cycle of modernization is paired with real, shipped customer value.

This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of shipping software customers depend on every day, and the craft of redesigning the system underneath.

What You’ll Own

Architecture & Technical Strategy

  • Define and drive the multi-year architectural evolution of CD Baby’s customer-facing platform from a .NET monolith to a modular, service-based architecture with clean API contracts between front end and back end.
  • Decompose the monolith into encapsulated services aligned to the core domains of the product — distribution, royalties, analytics, catalog management, account — with clear ownership, contracts, and operational boundaries.
  • Choose the right language and the right data store for each service. We are .NET and SQL Server today and will be for some time; we want a future where Go, Node, Python, and other languages live alongside .NET where they earn their place, and where data stores are selected to fit the workload rather than by default.
  • Own the application data model end-to-end, setting ORM patterns, schema design, and data access conventions that the back end team operates by.
  • Partner with Data Engineering to design data models and pipelines that flow cleanly into Snowflake, so analytics and reporting are first-class outputs of the platform.

Hands-On Delivery

  • Write production code. This is a Principal IC role; your influence comes from the work as much as from the design.
  • Help carry our platform cloud migration across the finish line, ensuring the back end matches the quality of the front end work already underway.
  • Establish and uphold engineering standards — CI/CD, automated testing, observability, performance, security — across the back end. Set the bar by writing the code that defines it.
  • Run a continuous-delivery cadence: every product cycle on distribution, royalty splits, analytics, or catalog tooling is also an opportunity to modernize a slice of the stack. You’ll plan that interleaving with product and the team so the platform gets better every quarter while we keep shipping for customers.

Mentorship & Team Craft

  • Be the kind of senior engineer others learn from by watching. We believe engineering is learned through mentorship and apprenticeship. You will set the tone for back end craftsmanship on the team and bring engineers up by working alongside them.
  • Collaborate closely on a cross-functional Platform team that pairs back end engineering with front end, SDET, data engineering, design, and product management. Your day-to-day work happens here, with these people.
  • Partner across organizational boundaries with infrastructure, internal tools, and the broader data engineering org. The most consequential architectural decisions happen at those seams.

Experience

  • 10+ years of progressive back end software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion of it in deep technical leadership roles — Principal, Staff, or equivalent IC.
  • Demonstrated track record of leading the decomposition of a monolithic application into a service-based architecture in production, while keeping the product operational throughout.
  • Deep, current expertise in .NET (C#) and SQL Server, including operating them at scale in containerized environments on a major cloud (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience translates).
  • Working fluency in at least one of Go, Node.js, or Python, and a clear point of view on when to reach for each. Comfort selecting and operating data stores beyond a single relational default (e.g., Postgres, key-value, document, search, columnar) based on the workload.
  • Strong experience with ORMs (Entity Framework, Dapper, or equivalents in other ecosystems) and a clear point of view on schema design, data modeling, migrations, and the trade-offs between ORM convenience and query performance at scale.
  • Hands-on experience designing API contracts (REST, GraphQL, gRPC — and the trade-offs among them) between front end and back end teams, including versioning, evolution, and contract testing.
  • Strong grasp of CI/CD, automated testing strategies, observability, and the operational disciplines that make continuous delivery safe at scale.
  • Experience partnering with data engineering on analytical pipelines, ideally including a modern warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
  • Music, media, or entertainment industry experience is welcome but not required — we will teach you the domain.

Skills & Competencies

  • Technical Authority: Deep expertise across modern back end architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, and cloud platforms. Ability to make and defend architectural decisions, and equally to change your mind when the evidence warrants.
  • Pragmatic Modernization: Comfort working inside an existing, valuable codebase rather than rewriting it. You see legacy systems as a starting point with real customer value, not an obstacle.
  • Bias for Shipping: Relentless focus on shipping customer value in tight cycles, including during architectural transitions. You break large changes into safely deployable increments.
  • Mentorship by Example: You raise the people around you through the quality of your work, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with another engineer to solve a hard problem.
  • Clear Communication: Ability to explain trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision — in writing, in design docs, and in person.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: You partner naturally with product, design, data, QA, and infrastructure, and you treat those partnerships as core to the engineering work, not adjacent to it.
  • Customer-Centric Mindset: Relentless focus on translating technical investments into measurable artist value, with comfort working directly with customer data and feedback.

Location

Remote within the United States. This role works on Pacific Time hours to maintain strong overlap with the Platform team.

Reporting Structure

This role reports to the Director of Engineering.

Compensation

CD Baby provides base salary ranges for all positions located in the United States at the time of posting. The hiring range for this position is $180,000 – $205,000 annually. As a candidate for this position, your salary and related elements of compensation will be contingent upon various factors including, but not limited to, work experience, geographic location, and relevant skills. Downtown is committed to providing a comprehensive market-competitive total rewards program for its employees which includes medical, dental, and vision, life insurance, 401(k) match, and generous paid time off. This range does not include any other variable compensation components.

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