Principal engineer and technical lead for a Dallas-based payments SaaS platform undergoing modernization to Microsoft Fabric and AI services. Reports to SVP of Technology, owns architectural implementation across Azure/AKS, C#/.NET and Python, and leads distributed teams. Role is 50% hands-on engineering, 25% design patterns, 25% technical leadership.
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%)
Design and implementation patterns (≈25%)
Technical leadership with delivery teams (≈25%)
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, PCI DSS controls
Required qualifications
Preferred qualifications
Eligibility Requirements
Job Type
Schedule
Work Location
Benefits