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Salary: USD 133,164.93 - 179,711.01 / annual
86 Repairs (operating as Parts Town) is the fastest-growing distributor of restaurant equipment, HVAC, and residential appliance parts. The company has been recognized on the Inc. 5000 list for 15 consecutive years and the Crain's Fast 50 list ten times, and has been voted a Chicago Tribune Top Workplace for four years running.
As Principal Backend Engineer, you will design, architect, and optimize scalable microservices powering the eCommerce and enterprise platforms. You'll drive backend architecture decisions and ensure seamless integration across systems including commerce, CMS, ERP, PIM, and marketing platforms. This is a technical leadership role where you'll champion best practices in modularization, API design, and event-driven architectures while leveraging Node.js, TypeScript, Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies to build secure, high-performance services.
Key responsibilities include designing cloud-native microservices with seamless interoperability; implementing and advocating for modularization, API-first, and event-driven architectures using domain-driven design principles; establishing CI/CD practices, automated testing standards, and backend tooling; leading disaster recovery strategies and defining observability and logging best practices; optimizing APIs, caching, and databases in collaboration with frontend, DevOps, and data teams; and mentoring engineers while collaborating with other Principal Engineers on architectural decisions.
You'll own backend engineering policies, CI/CD pipelines, and testing automation to ensure reliable deployments. You'll define logging, observability, and disaster recovery strategies to maintain high availability across systems. Collaboration across frontend, DevOps, and data teams will be essential to optimizing overall system performance.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- 10+ years of experience in backend system design, eCommerce, and distributed applications
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English
- Expert-level proficiency in Node.js, TypeScript, and cloud-native platforms (Azure preferred)
- Deep knowledge of databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis), microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka, NATS), and API standards (REST, GraphQL)
- Experience with unit, integration, and contract testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, Pact) and CI/CD tools (Terraform, Pulumi)
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), serverless computing, Kubernetes, and containerization
- Proven ability to mentor engineers and collaborate effectively across teams
PREFERRED:
- Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across cross-functional teams
