Principal Backend or Architect Engineer

Context

KwikKart is an AI-Powered Connected Store Infrastructure for Physical Grocery. Modernizing shopping for customers while turning standard carts into the infrastructure for real-time intelligence, in-store media, and data analytics for the grocery ecosystem.

Role Description

We are seeking a full-time Principal Backend Engineer to ideally join our team on-site in Austin, TX, but are open to remote. In this role, you will design, develop, and maintain scalable, efficient backend systems to power KwikKart’s innovative solutions. You will collaborate with teams to integrate backend services with front-end applications, maintain our hardware architecture, and optimize performance. 

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What We're Looking For

Someone who can manage a leadership role and take the leap into a pre-seed startup environment, can take initiative, manage themselves, and lead a small team of dedicated engineers. This is a core role for our growing company, and will be considered for a significant equity stake, depending on long-term mutual fit. 

We don't support foreign needs such as H-1B.

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What You Will Do
- Design and implement backend features using .NET, Orleans, and vertical-slice / CQRS patterns. 
- Own grain contracts, orchestration flows, and state evolution across domains such as carts, orders, inventory, promotions, customer data, and event processing. 
- Build and maintain internal and external APIs, webhook flows, telemetry ingestion, and device synchronization services. 
- Improve system reliability, latency, and scale across caching, persistence, concurrency, and failure handling. 
- Define and enforce clear domain boundaries, contracts, and multi-tenant isolation practices. 
- Write and review high-quality automated tests across unit, grain, integration, and contract layers. 
- Partner with platform engineering on deployment readiness, observability, and performance tuning. 
- Help establish practical engineering standards and mentor other developers. 

Required Experience
- 8+ years in backend software engineering. 
- Strong C# / .NET experience. 
- Linux OS 
- Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven patterns, or actor-model systems. 
- Experience designing APIs and service contracts in production systems. 
- Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, retries, idempotency, and fault tolerance. 
- Experience with PostgreSQL or similar databases, Redis/caching, and production observability. 
- Strong testing discipline and code review habits. 

Preferred Experience
- Direct Orleans experience. 
- Experience with CQRS, MediatR, vertical-slice architecture, or DDD-style service design. 
- Experience in multi-tenant SaaS or retail / commerce systems. 
- Familiarity with Citus, Couchbase, telemetry pipelines, or edge / device synchronization systems. 
- Experience working in Azure-hosted production systems. 

What success looks like in 3 months 
Owns at least one major domain end to end.
Improves release confidence and backend velocity.
Reduces architectural drift and hidden operational risk.
Produces production-ready features with strong tests and low rework.