--- title: 'Principal Engineer & Technical Lead — Azure / Containers at Aperia' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-technical-lead-azure-containers-aperia-dallas-4ehhj9pzv5kp' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-30' --- # Principal Engineer & Technical Lead — Azure / Containers at Aperia - **Company:** Aperia - **Location:** Dallas, TX - **Posted:** 2026-10-30 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-30 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/aperiasolutions/jobs/5279653007 ## Job description ## 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, PCI DSS controls Required qualifications - 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years as a lead or principal engineer shipping production cloud systems. - 4+ years building and operating containerized workloads on Kubernetes in production, preferably AKS. - Deep, current hands-on Azure experience: you have personally built, deployed and debugged the services you work with. - Code you can show: substantial, active C#/.NET and Python work in the last 12 months, not just reviews. You are still one of the strongest individual contributors on any team you join. - Deep, applied command of enterprise design patterns (messaging, resilience, integration, multi-tenancy); you can explain their failure modes because you have hit them in production. - Track record of taking a novel concept from whiteboard to working POC in weeks, then building or leading the first production slice. - Working architecture depth across operational and analytical data stores, including event-driven and streaming implementations. - Fluency with IaC and CI/CD; you write the Terraform and the pipeline, not just the diagram. - Security-first implementation in a regulated environment (PCI DSS, SOC 2, or financial services equivalent). - Proven ability to lead distributed and offshore teams through design and code reviews without direct authority. - Clear written communication: ADRs, design docs and status summaries that stand on their own. ## Preferred qualifications - Payments, card processing, risk/fraud, or merchant services domain experience. - Production Microsoft Fabric work, including mirroring from Cosmos DB or SQL and Fabric capacity sizing. - Shipped LLM-backed features: RAG, agent/tool patterns, content safety, evaluation and red-teaming. - Multi-tenant SaaS design: tenant isolation, noisy-neighbor controls, per-tenant cost attribution. - Azure certifications such as Azure Developer (AZ-204), DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400), CKAD/CKA, or Fabric Analytics Engineer (DP-600). Nice to have, never a substitute for demonstrated work. - Open-source contributions, technical writing or conference talks. Eligibility Requirements - Must be willing to submit to a background investigation and drug test as part of the selection process. Job Type - Full-time Schedule - Hybrid: Monday to Friday Work Location - Dallas, TX ## Benefits - Health insurance - Health savings account - Dental insurance - Vision insurance - 401(k) matching - Life insurance - Paid time off - Parental leave - Disability insurance - Childcare assistance - Education reimbursement - Fitness membership - Volunteer time off ## About Aperia ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Aperia is a privately held fintech and managed consultancy firm that builds SaaS platforms and delivers technology services to financial institutions, payment companies, and government agencies. - **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped — 100% privately owned, purpose-driven) - **Headquarters**: Dallas, Texas, United States - **Founded**: 1999 (or 2001 per LinkedIn; the company website states "over 25 years" of leadership) - **Founders**: Not publicly disclosed ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: Fintech, Payments, Government/Defense Technology, IT Services - **Target Customers**: Banks, processors, payment facilitators, merchant service providers, independent sales organizations, and government/defense entities (B2B, Enterprise) - **Mission Statement**: Not explicitly stated as a single quote, but the company describes itself as "Built on Purpose, Driven by Impact" and focuses on "innovation, usability, and security" to help organizations "operate smarter, faster, and with confidence." ## Products & Services - **Compliance Platform**: Streamlines education, assessment, tracking, and regulatory reporting for regulated environments. - **Risk Management / Fraud Detection**: Real-time monitoring, intelligent analytics, and automated fraud detection; analyzes hundreds of millions of transactions. - **Customer Onboarding**: Digitizes and streamlines onboarding with automated workflows and accelerated activation. - **Analytics & Business Intelligence**: Advanced analytics and flexible reporting to turn data into actionable insight. - **Compensation Management**: Automates complex partner and agent compensation with configurable models and accurate reporting. - **Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP)**: Unifies case management, service workflows, and performance metrics in a configurable interface. - **Software Development as a Service (SDaaS)**: Full-stack engineering for platform modernization and custom development. - **Managed Resources**: On-demand access to expert Agile teams that integrate with client organizations. - **Consultancy**: Close partnership to solve complex, data-driven problems and refine processes. - **Government, Defense & Security**: Cloud-native solutions for data unification, situational awareness, and mission-critical operations. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed (privately held) - **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue estimated at **$56.2M** (per LinkedIn data); serves **over 6 million users** across hundreds of clients - **Notable Investors/Partners**: 100% privately owned; no external investors listed. Clients include banks, payment processors, and government agencies. - **Growth Signals**: Global workforce of **400+ employees** (LinkedIn reports 187 but the company website states 400+; the discrepancy may reflect total headcount including contractors/global offices). Offices in Dallas, Washington DC, and Vietnam. Senior management average tenure of **18 years**. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep Fintech & Payments Expertise**: Over 25 years of experience solving complex data and reconciliation challenges for the payments industry. - **Long-Term Client Relationships**: Emphasizes partnership over vendor status; high client retention. - **Regulatory & Security Focus**: Deep experience in highly regulated industries (payments, banking, government). - **Stable Leadership**: Senior management team with average tenure of 18 years ensures strategic continuity. - **Global Delivery Model**: Offices in the US and Vietnam enable cost-effective, round-the-clock development and support. ## Strategic Focus - Continued expansion of SaaS platforms for compliance, risk, and customer intelligence - Deepening capabilities in government, defense, and security sectors - Scaling managed resources and SDaaS offerings - Maintaining a 100% privately owned, purpose-driven model for long-term growth ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Describes itself as "a family" where "no single role is more important than another." Core values: Innovation, Usability, Security, Partnership, Transparency, Teamwork. - **Work Model**: Hybrid working model in place (as of 2022). "We value your individual contribution and trust your results, regardless of your role." - **Global Team**: Fast-paced, global organization with offices in Dallas, Washington DC, and Vietnam. - **Career Growth**: "A career at Aperia promises a great challenge, culture, and opportunities to forge your own path." Open roles include Product Manager, Project Manager, Senior Software Developer, and more. - **Stability**: Privately owned with no outside investors, allowing long-term strategic focus. - **Diversity & Inclusion**: Equal Opportunity/M/F/Vet/LGBT/Disabled Employer. ## Sources 1. [aperia.com](https://www.aperia.com/) 2. [aperia.com/about](https://www.aperia.com/about) 3. [aperia.com/services](https://www.aperia.com/services) 4. [Greenhouse Careers Page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/aperiasolutions) 5. [LinkedIn Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aperia-solutions-inc.)