Principal Architect-Platform

Key Responsibilities

• Set the vision: Author and socialize the product/platform architecture strategy; maintain ADRs and tech radars.
• Design at scale: Lead designs for multi-tenant isolation, data models, schemas, indexing/OLAP, and event-driven systems.
• Evolve the platform: Standardize service meshes, API gateways, policy-as-code, and multi-cloud deployment patterns.
• Operational excellence: Embed SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident learning), capacity planning, and chaos testing.
• Security & privacy: Lead threat models, data classification, encryption, secrets, key management, and SBOM/SLSA controls.
• AI architecture: Define patterns for RAG/agents, prompt & model governance, telemetry, evaluations, and fallbacks.
• Mentor & scale: Coach Staff/Principal engineers and architects; chair architecture reviews; build a healthy review culture.
• Executive partnering: Communicate options/trade-offs to C-suite; align decisions with business value and customer impact.
• Customer evangelism: Join key enterprise conversations; convert requirements into pragmatic designs and phased delivery.

Qualifications

• 20+ years in product/platform architecture for large-scale, cloud-native SaaS; recent Principal/Distinguished Architect scope leading end-to-end product decisions and migrations across multi-cloud.
• Cloud & Kubernetes depth: EKS/AKS/GKE; service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), observability (Prometheus/Grafana), platform control planes, operators/CRDs. Able to define golden paths/paved roads for teams.
• Data platform & streaming expertise: Kafka/Flink/Spark; columnar/OLAP (Druid, ClickHouse), NoSQL (Cassandra), search (Elasticsearch/Opensearch); real-time + batch patterns.
• Microservices & integration at enterprise scale: API gateways, event-driven design, SOA/EAI (Apache Camel/Mule/WSO2/JBoss Fuse).
• AI/ML & Agentic AI in production: ML pipelines (MLflow/Kubeflow/Airflow) and LLM/agent frameworks (OpenAI APIs, LLaMA, LangChain/LangGraph; tool-use, memory, evals).
• Security, privacy, and compliance by design: threat modeling, data classification, encryption/keys, and EU GDPR awareness through real product work.
• Executive communication & customer leadership: converts complex trade-offs into simple choices; partners with CXO/stakeholders globally; architecture evangelism with customers.
• C-suite influence & decision facilitation: runs architecture reviews/SteerCos with crisp options, risk/ROI framing, and written decision records; pre-wires global stakeholders to land decisions quickly.
• Customer-back product thinking: meets enterprises regularly, translates requirements into phased designs (MVP → scale), and defends non-negotiables (SLOs, security, privacy).
• Cross-geo orchestration: proven delivery across US/EU/India time zones; builds async rituals, documentation standards, and handoff mechanisms that raise velocity and quality.
• Culture carrier & coaching: uplevels Staff/Principal engineers, codifies paved roads (CI/CD, testing, observability), and scales architectural patterns via ADRs/radars.

Preferred Qualifications

• Multi-cloud platform stewardship: proven ownership of cross-cloud platforms (e.g., control planes, observability, incident management) and data lake stacks, shipped to enterprise customers.
• Cost/performance engineering: track record reducing infra cost per tenant and improving p95/p99 latency/MTTR via capacity planning, workload placement, and autoscaling patterns.
• Programming fluency: Java/Scala/Python/Go/Rust for credible code-review and reference implementations.
• OSS & ecosystem contribution: prior contributions to relevant frameworks (e.g., Hadoop tuning, NoSQL ORM, Camel/Keycloak) a plus.