Principal Software Engineer - Streaming Platform

About the role

Autodesk is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to own the architecture and technical design of a large-scale, API-first streaming platform built on Apache Flink, Apache Kafka and AWS. The platform handles near-real-time ingestion, processing and delivery of data for internal and product-facing use cases, exposing capabilities through APIs and a self-serve portal. The role carries real architectural ownership, partnering across product, platform and data teams and mentoring engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and design the streaming platform: ingest, stateful processing, delivery, replay and integration with downstream systems on Flink and Kafka
• Define API-first boundaries (REST and event-driven patterns) and multi-tenant patterns such as quotas, isolation, naming, observability and upgrade strategies
• Evolve AWS-native deployment and operations, including networking, IAM, scaling and resilience patterns
• Lead design of Spring Boot-based control-plane services and contribute to the self-serve portal UX
• Improve developer experience: documentation, SDKs or clients, golden paths and time-to-first-successful pipeline
• Define SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, backpressure handling and failure modes
• Institutionalize testing (unit, integration, contract, load) and progressive delivery
• Own observability: metrics, tracing, structured logging and alerting for Kafka and Flink
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, partner on Infrastructure as Code, environment strategy and operational runbooks, and take part in on-call or escalations
• Lead technically: turn ambiguous requirements into RFCs and execution plans, mentor engineers, lead code reviews and set standards for Java, APIs, streaming and AWS

Required profile

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep hands-on ownership of distributed systems in production
• Demonstrated experience shipping user-facing or internal portals or significant full-stack contributions
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to drive consensus across engineering, product and operations

Required skills

• Expert-level Apache Kafka and Apache Flink
• Strong Java and Spring Boot (or equivalent JVM microservices framework)
• AWS services, with familiarity with Kubernetes or managed container/orchestration patterns
• CI/CD and infrastructure as code concepts

Preferred: experience with a streaming/data platform used by many teams, schema governance, AWS managed streaming services (MSK, Kinesis), Kafka/Flink observability stacks, and contributions to technical standards or architecture forums. The role may require in-person onboarding and ID verification.