Principal Backend Engineer (Hybrid)

Colliers is a leading diversified professional services and investment management company. With operations in 68 countries, our 22,000 enterprising people work collaboratively to provide expert advice to maximize the potential of property and real assets to accelerate the success of our clients, our investors and our people.

We are at the forefront of the real estate industry, leading the way and backed by an exceptional record of success. We are building for our future – and yours.

We strive to build our business at a competitive pace by augmenting internal growth with smart strategic acquisitions that increase market share, expand service offerings and extend our geographic reach for the benefit of our clients and shareholders.

For more than 29 years, Colliers has created value for shareholders that has resulted in superior returns and industry growth. Our people also own significant equity in our business, which brings pride of ownership to everything we do. We are passionate, take personal responsibility and always do what's right for our clients, people and communities.

Purpose of Position

We are seeking an experienced and passionate Principal Software Engineer for our newly established Technology Hub in Madrid. This is a unique opportunity to become part of the founding team that helps shape the culture, practices, and technical direction. Working in a hybrid model (remote & onsite), you will enjoy significant freedom to innovate and influence the future of one of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies. With the leadership of the Global Technology Hub coming from a background of technology startups, you will benefit from a fast-paced learning environment, high visibility of your contributions and opportunities to shape processes, culture, and technology strategies. At the same time, you take advantage of the stability, resources, and reach of a successful global company.

Guided by our global digital strategy, the Madrid Hub collaborates closely with international teams to deliver world-class technology solutions that power the future of commercial real estate.

As Principal Software Engineer , you will be instrumental in translating business and functional requirements into robust, scalable, and evolvable system architectures. This role goes beyond today’s requirements: you will actively anticipate future business needs, emerging technological trends, and architectural evolution, ensuring our platforms remain resilient, adaptable, and aligned with long-term strategy.

You will work closely with business stakeholders, product leaders, engineers, and platform teams to uncover implicit requirements, challenge assumptions, and shape solutions that deliver lasting business value. This is a high-impact role with considerable influence over technology direction, architectural standards, and system design across multiple products and regions.

Your expertise will contribute directly to the quality of modern, component-based front-end application built with React and Typescript, as well as robust backend services developed in .NET.

You are a hands-on problem-solver with strong quality principles, who thrives in a collaborative and agile environment. This role offers the opportunity to heavily influence technical direction and bridge the gap between business and teams while building solutions with genuine business impact.

Essential Functions and Job Duties

Architecture and System Design

• Design and evolve end-to-end system architectures based on functional and non-functional requirements, balancing business goals, scalability, security, performance, and cost.
• Produce clear architectural artefacts (diagrams, decision records, reference implementations) that guide engineering teams through implementation.
• Translate high-level business needs into clear architectural designs and proofs of concept, including system boundaries, integration patterns, data flows, and technology choices.
• Ensure architecture is modular, maintainable, secure, performant and adaptable to future requirements.
• Ask the right questions to uncover implicit, hidden, or conflicting requirements not easily identified due to their nature.

• Challenge assumptions and propose alternative solutions when requirements introduce unnecessary complexity or long-term risk.

Technical Leadership and Governance

• Work closely with Engineering Managers and act as a trusted advisor for software engineering teams.
• Ensure consistency and quality through architecture reviews, design walkthroughs, and technical governance forums.
• Identify gaps or friction between enterprise standards and practical delivery needs and proactively propose improvements.
• Ensure architectural compliance through influence, coaching, and design collaboration rather than formal enforcement.

Collaboration and Delivery Enablement

• Work closely with Software Engineering, Product Management, DevOps, EngOps teams to ensure architectural alignment throughout delivery.
• Partner with DevOps and Cloud Engineering teams to ensure application architectures align with platform capabilities, CI/CD pipelines, and operational models.
• Collaborate with Engineering Operations to ensure architectural decisions support delivery metrics, reliability goals, and operational excellence.
• Support engineering teams during implementation, helping resolve complex design or integration challenges.
• Ensure architecture aligns with security, compliance, and regulatory requirements across regions.

Qualifications

Required Skills/Experience:

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, and at least 5+ years in software architecture or system design roles.
• Proven ability to design complex, distributed, and scalable systems.
• Strong understanding of SOA, microservices, event-driven architectures, and API development (REST/GraphQL).
• Strong background in modern backend architectures (e.g. .NET, microservices, event-driven systems, APIs), and modern frontend architectures (e.g. React, TypeScript) and how they integrate with backend services.
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architectures and containerization.
• Experience with SQL and NOSQL databases (e.g. SQL Server or Postgres SQL, Cosmos DB, MongoDB), as well as caching with Redis or similar.
• Strong grasp of non-functional requirements: performance, scalability, availability, security, and observability.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and influence technical direction without direct management authority, fluent in English and Spanish.
• Agile Development experience (Scrum/Kanban), including story estimation, code reviews, and pair programming.
• Experience working in distributed or remote teams and using tools such as Jira, GitHub, Miro, and Azure DevOps.
• Solid understanding of performance optimization.
• Enthusiastic about building high-quality software products with empowered teams.
• Understanding of secure development practices and compliance frameworks (e.g. ISO27001, GDPR, SOC2).

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• Experience with performance testing and security testing tools
• Experience in working in a global, multi-cultural organization.
• Exposure to domain-driven design (DDD) and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, growing tech environment and to foster change in larger organizations.
• Experience working closely with DevOps, CloudOps, SRE and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, IaaC