Principal Architect

Responsibilities

• Own the overall system architecture across multiple domains, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
• Define and drive the long-term architectural vision and technical roadmap aligned with business goals.
• Design and review high-level system designs, data flows, integration patterns, and technology choices.
• Act as a technical authority for complex architectural decisions, trade-offs, and design reviews.
• Partner with Principal Engineers, Engineering Managers, and Product Managers to translate business requirements into robust architectural solutions.
• Establish and evolve architecture standards, design principles, and best practices across teams.
• Identify architectural risks and proactively drive mitigation strategies.
• Enable teams through hands-on guidance, reference architectures, and design frameworks rather than day-to-day coding ownership.
• Drive adoption of microservices, event-driven systems, cloud-native patterns, and data platforms.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and tools, guiding adoption where they create long-term value.
• Support performance optimization, system resiliency, cost optimization, and platform modernization initiatives.
• Participate in technical leadership forums, architecture councils, and senior technical reviews.
• Contribute to hiring, mentor senior engineers, and shape the engineering culture.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant focus on system architecture and design.
• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale, distributed, cloud-based systems.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, fault tolerance, microservices, event-driven architectures, API design, data modeling, and integration patterns.
• Strong experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex architectural concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with data-intensive, AI/ML, or big-data platforms.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and cloud cost optimization.
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Prior experience in a Principal Architect, Staff Architect, or equivalent technical leadership role.
• Experience working in fast-scaling SaaS or enterprise platforms.

Compensation and Benefits

• Health coverage.
• Paid parental leave.
• Paid time off and holidays.
• Quarterly self-care days off.
• Stock options.
• Equipment and support for working from home or in an office.
• Learning and development initiatives, including LinkedIn Learning access.
• Wellness education sessions and employee resource group events.