Principal Backend Software Engineer (TypeScript, Node.js, Distributed Systems)

Principal Backend Software Engineer (TypeScript, Node.js, Distributed Systems) About Us Founded in 2011, Modus is a global, fully remote team of world-class technologists who thrive in a collaborative, innovative environment. We’re a digital product engineering partner for forward-thinking businesses. Our global teams work side-by-side with clients to design, build, and scale custom solutions that achieve real results and lasting change, partnering with industry leaders including AWS, GitHub, and Atlassian. We were fully remote before it was cool! Recognized as one of the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies for nine years and a top remote work company by FlexJobs, we have helped some of the world’s largest brands deliver powerful digital experiences. As an award-winning Atlassian partner with a world-class team, we help organizations innovate and solve complex challenges for Fortune 500 companies and beyond, we want to hear from you. Opportunity! We are looking for a Principal Backend Software Engineer to help accelerate the engineering roadmap of a leading SaaS platform in the sports technology and youth sports management space. You’ll work on modern backend services supporting high-volume product experiences across areas such as video and content delivery, e-commerce, monetization, scheduling, and team management . Following a significant platform modernization, the team is continuing to evolve its architecture and expand critical product capabilities. This is a highly hands-on role for an engineer who thrives in ambiguous environments, combines strong systems architecture with a product mindset , and can operate with a high degree of autonomy. You’ll take ownership of feature execution, independently navigate unfamiliar codebases, and use modern agentic coding tools such as Claude Code to accelerate development, testing, and technical discovery. Requirements: 8+ years of production software engineering experience building and operating complex software systems. 4+ years of hands-on experience building backend microservices and REST APIs with TypeScript and Node.js . Strong experience designing distributed, idempotent, and event-driven systems and resilient asynchronous workflows. Hands-on experience with Express.js , with the ability to separate routing and framework concerns from core domain and business logic. Strong understanding of backend architecture, API design, reliability, transaction consistency, and asynchronous processing. Demonstrated experience using Claude Code or comparable AI-assisted/agentic development tools as part of day-to-day software engineering. Ability to independently explore unfamiliar codebases, identify dependencies, understand complex business logic, and move solutions forward with minimal oversight. Strong product thinking , including the ability to ask clarifying questions, understand user and business value, evaluate trade-offs, and recommend pragmatic technical solutions. Experience designing stable, contract-driven APIs consumed by web and/or native mobile applications . Working familiarity with AWS, Terraform, Infrastructure as Code, and modern DevOps practices . Working knowledge of React and the ability to contribute to frontend integration when feature delivery requires cross-stack changes. Strong communication skills and experience working effectively within distributed engineering teams. Ability to maintain substantial working-hour overlap with Pacific Time (PT) . Bonus points: Experience designing backend services consumed by native iOS/Swift and Android/Kotlin applications . Experience with high-volume media processing, content delivery, e-commerce, payments, or monetization systems . Experience modernizing or decomposing legacy monolithic applications into modern service-based architectures. Deep experience with message-driven architectures, queues, event processing, and distributed transaction patterns. Experi