Principal Backend Engineer Content Architecture

Position :: 100 % Remote

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the evolution of our omnichannel digital commerce platform, with a strong focus on Content Architecture and Headless CMS strategy. This role sits at the intersection of transactional commerce systems and dynamic content delivery, enabling seamless experiences across web, mobile, and in-store channels.

You will serve as a technical leader and hands-on architect, driving the design of scalable, cloud-native content services. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Sanity.io and structured content modeling, and remains highly technical-spending the majority of time in the codebase-to ensure performance, scalability, and resilience at scale.

Technical Requirements

Core Expertise

• Headless CMS: Strong experience with Sanity.io (preferred), Contentful, or similar platforms
• Content Querying: Advanced proficiency in GROQ
• Cloud Platforms: Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform)
• Languages: Java/Kotlin (Node.js/TypeScript highly preferred)
• Architecture: REST APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems

Preferred Qualifications

• DevOps & Infrastructure: Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Harness/Jenkins
• Structured Data Standards: Portable Text, JSON-LD
• Frontend Awareness: Understanding of integration with Next.js, React, or Flutter

Key Responsibilities

1. Content Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Headless CMS Ownership: Lead architecture and implementation of Sanity.io, designing schemas that balance editorial flexibility with strong data governance.
• Structured Content Strategy: Drive the transition from page-based to structured, reusable content models powering omnichannel delivery.
• System Integration: Partner with Enterprise Architecture to seamlessly integrate CMS with Google Cloud Platform-based microservices (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, APIs).

2. CMS Engineering (Sanity.io Focus)

• Schema & Query Optimization: Design scalable schemas and optimize content retrieval using GROQ for high-performance delivery.
• Custom Studio Development: Extend Sanity Studio with custom components and plugins to enhance developer and editor productivity.
• Event-Driven Content Pipelines: Build robust webhook and event-based workflows to synchronize content across downstream systems and caches.
• Portable Text Implementation: Standardize handling of rich text as structured data to ensure consistent cross-channel rendering.

3. Engineering Excellence & Platform Scalability

• CI/CD for Content Platforms: Establish automated testing and CI/CD pipelines (Harness) for schema changes, content migrations, and deployments.
• Reusable Frameworks: Develop shared patterns, SDKs, and "starter kits" for integrating CMS data across backend services.
• Performance & Caching: Own content caching strategies to ensure low-latency delivery without impacting critical commerce flows.

4. Mentorship & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Cross-Team Partnership: Collaborate with Product, UX/UI, and Frontend teams to translate creative requirements into scalable backend content models.
• Technical Mentorship: Guide engineering teams on headless CMS best practices, structured content design, and modern backend patterns.
• Enablement Culture: Promote knowledge sharing to ensure teams operate autonomously without bottlenecks.