Senior Principal Applications Engineer

Position Overview

Autodesk is seeking an accomplished Senior Principal Applications Engineer to provide technical leadership and architectural vision across strategic initiatives within the Growth Experience Technology (GET) organization. This role is responsible for shaping the long-term technology strategy, driving architectural excellence, and influencing the design and delivery of scalable platforms and integrations that enable Customer Success teams to drive customer adoption, engagement, retention, and business outcomes at scale.

As a senior technical leader, you will partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, Architecture, and executive stakeholders to define technical roadmaps, solve complex business and engineering challenges, and ensure the successful execution of critical initiatives. You will lead the design of highly available, secure, and scalable distributed systems, establish engineering standards and best practices, and mentor engineers across multiple teams.
The ideal candidate is a hands-on technologist with deep expertise in modern cloud-native architectures, platform engineering, AI-assisted development, and enterprise integrations. You are passionate about innovation, thrive in ambiguous environments, and have a proven track record of influencing technical direction across organizations. You combine strategic thinking with execution excellence and are motivated by delivering measurable customer and business impact through technology.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision and architecture for multiple enterprise platforms and services, including CRM ecosystems, translating product strategy and OKRs into measurable technical roadmaps

• Lead the design and delivery of highly available, secure, and scalable production systems, including microservices, enterprise APIs, Salesforce CRM solutions, integration services, orchestration platforms, and modern web applications

• Define the enterprise architecture for all integrations, ensuring seamless connectivity with internal and external business systems through REST APIs, middleware, event-driven architectures, and integration platform on AWS

• Drive cross-organizational architectural decisions on application design, integration patterns, API standards, tooling, and engineering frameworks to promote consistency, reuse, scalability, and governance across engineering teams

• Produce and review production-quality code, architecture documents, technical design specifications, runbooks, and lead major migrations, cutovers, platform modernization initiatives, and enterprise transformation programs

• Define and enforce engineering standards for CI/CD, automated testing, observability, SLOs/SLIs, security, governance, cost optimization, resiliency, and autoscaling across cloud-native platforms

• Champion comprehensive automated testing strategies, including unit, integration, contract, regression, performance, and load testing, while enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery

• Own operational readiness and platform reliability in partnership with SRE teams, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, disaster recovery, backup and restore, production support, and capacity planning

• Partner closely with Product Management, Enterprise Architects, Engineering Managers, Business Systems, and cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize technical initiatives, manage dependencies, and align engineering investments with business outcomes

• Provide technical leadership for enterprise CRM strategy, Salesforce platform evolution, and large-scale enterprise integration initiatives, ensuring scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions

• Mentor Principal Engineers, Senior Engineers, and Engineering Managers through architecture reviews, technical coaching, and engineering best practices while cultivating technical leadership across the organization

• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including AI/ML, GenAI, workflow orchestration, event streaming, and modern integration platforms, proactively identifying technical debt, architectural risks, and opportunities for continuous improvement
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 14+ years of software development experience with demonstrated expertise across the full product development lifecycle

• Proven experience architecting enterprise applications and preferably CRM ecosystems

• Deep technical expertise in a critical technology or capability area, with the ability to act as an authoritative expert on technology, tooling, or domain

• Extensive experience designing and implementing enterprise integration solutions using REST APIs, webhooks, asynchronous messaging, middleware platforms, and event-driven architectures

• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud services (EC2, S3, IAM, RDS, Lambda, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, EKS) and designing resilient, secure, and highly available multi-region architectures

• Proven ability to lead key business outcomes and initiatives, with accountability for results that impact the division or functional area

• Strong experience designing and evolving SDKs, APIs, and platform capabilities consumed by multiple teams and connector integrations

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction and achieve alignment across teams and divisions without direct authority

• Experience building desktop application plugins or extensions that integrate with cloud-based platforms and services

• Strong understanding of build automation, CI/CD pipelines, and developer experience optimization

• Ability to clearly articulate the business drivers for an area of technical investment

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating Salesforce with enterprise applications including ERP, Customer Success platforms (e.g., Gainsight), data warehouses, marketing automation, identity providers, and third-party SaaS applications

• Experience designing event-driven architectures using event buses, asynchronous messaging, and distributed workflows

• Experience building AI-powered enterprise applications using GenAI technologies, LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, AI agents, or Model Context Protocol (MCP)

• Experience leading large-scale cloud modernization, digital transformation, or enterprise platform migration initiatives

• Experience designing secure, compliant enterprise platforms with knowledge of OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML, Zero Trust architecture, PCI, SOC 2, GDPR, or similar security and compliance frameworks

• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), Kubernetes platform engineering, GitOps, and developer platform tooling

• Demonstrated ability to influence executive stakeholders, drive technology strategy across multiple engineering organizations, and build consensus on long-term architectural direction