Principal Engineer & Technical Lead — Azure / Containers

About this role

About Aperia Solutions

Aperia Solutions is a leading payments SaaS company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We build risk management, residuals accounting, compliance, and analytics platforms used by merchant banks, ISOs, payment processors, and other participants in the credit card payments ecosystem. Operating under PCI DSS 4.0 compliance across dual on-premises datacenters (Allen, TX and Chicago, IL) plus Azure cloud, we process high-volume payment data for some of the industry’s largest players.

We’re in the middle of a significant platform modernization program: a next-generation risk analysis and scoring platform on Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered ingestion platform, new AI-native applications, and ongoing evolution of the products our clients rely on every day. The teams executing this work are deliberately small and senior, with executive-level support and minimal bureaucracy. Every senior hire is a founding contributor to the architecture and the code.

Role summary

We are hiring a Principal Engineer and Technical Lead: a builder first, with deep architecture and enterprise design pattern experience behind every line of code. This person is the SVP of Technology's chief lieutenant on technical execution. You will take on the heaviest technical lifting, prove risky ideas with working prototypes, turn approved architecture into production systems, and hold distributed engineering teams to a high technical bar.

This is a hands-on role, not an architecture-only or slideware role. Target architecture is set with technology leadership; you own making it real, from implementation design, code and IaC through the hard production problems, and you push back with evidence when a design won't hold up in implementation.

The platform is a regulated, multi-tenant payments SaaS built on Azure, Microsoft Fabric, AKS, C#/.NET and Python. You will report directly to the SVP of Technology and act as the senior hands-on technical authority across platform, data and AI initiatives.

Title options: Principal Engineer, Lead Software Engineer / Technical Lead – Cloud Platforms, or Staff Engineer – Azure.

What you'll do

Hands-on engineering, POCs and heavy lifting (≈50%)

• Build working prototypes and POCs for advanced concepts (LLM/RAG services, event-driven pipelines, multi-tenant patterns, new Azure services) to retire technical risk before teams commit.

• Own the hardest technical slices end to end: write and ship production-quality C#/.NET and Python, debug production issues, and unblock teams by doing the work rather than delegating it.

• Implement enterprise design patterns in real code: event-driven and messaging (outbox, saga, idempotent consumers, retries and dead-lettering), CQRS, resilience (circuit breaker, bulkhead, backpressure), caching and multi-tenant isolation.

• Author and review IaC (Terraform/Bicep), Helm charts and CI/CD pipelines; build the golden-path templates teams adopt.

• Benchmark and load test candidate designs; bring numbers, not opinions, to technical decisions.

• Take on heavy-lift tasks directly from the SVP: technical spikes, hands-on vendor evaluations, migration tooling, and performance and cost investigations.

Design and implementation patterns (≈25%)

• Turn target-state architectures into implementation designs: service boundaries, contracts, data models and deployment topology across AKS, Container Apps, Functions, APIM, Service Bus/Event Hubs, Cosmos DB and Azure SQL.

• Build and harden integration paths into Microsoft Fabric (OneLake, Lakehouse/Warehouse, mirroring, Real-Time Intelligence), knowing where the sharp edges are from having hit them.

• Write ADRs and design docs for the decisions made during implementation, and contribute to architecture reviews and threat models with implementation-level detail.

• Implement regulated-workload controls in code and IaC: network isolation, private endpoints, identity (Entra ID, managed identity, workload identity), secrets, encryption and audit.

• Bring run-cost to every build: estimate before, measure after, and flag designs that won't scale economically.

Technical leadership with delivery teams (≈25%)

• Act as the SVP's chief lieutenant on technical execution: carry decisions into teams, keep builds aligned with approved designs, and stand in on technical matters when the SVP is unavailable.

• Run design reviews, code reviews and technical checkpoints with onshore and offshore teams across multiple time zones.

• Track technical status and surface risk early: integration gaps, drift from approved designs, quality and security debt.

• Mentor senior engineers and tech leads; raise the bar on implementation quality, testing and observability.

• Translate implementation status and risk into concise options for technology leadership, and work directly with security, product and vendors.

Technical stack

Candidates should be expert in the core column and fluent in most of the adjacent column.

Area

Core (expert)

Adjacent (fluent)

Cloud

Azure: AKS, Container Apps, APIM, Functions, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Key Vault, Front Door

Azure Policy, Landing Zones, AWS/EKS equivalents

Data

Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL

Databricks, Synapse, ClickHouse, Kafka

Languages

C# / .NET 8+, Python

TypeScript, SQL/KQL, Go

Design patterns

Event-driven/messaging (outbox, saga, idempotency), CQRS, resilience patterns, multi-tenant isolation

DDD, hexagonal/clean architecture, API versioning, enterprise integration patterns

Containers

Docker, Kubernetes, Helm

Dapr, KEDA, service mesh, GitOps (Flux/Argo)

IaC and delivery

Terraform, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions

Bicep, policy-as-code, container image signing/scanning

AI

Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry, RAG patterns

Semantic Kernel, LangChain, vector search, evaluation tooling

Observability

Azure Monitor, App Insights, OpenTelemetry

Prometheus, Grafana

Security

Entra ID, managed/workload identity, private networking

Defender for Cloud,…