Principal Architect-Network
Principal Architect defining end-to-end architecture for a multi-tenant cloud-native SaaS data platform. Sets vision across cloud infrastructure, data streaming, AI/ML integration, security, and developer experience while mentoring senior engineers and influencing C-suite decisions.
About the job
Enterprise & Product Architecture
- Define the north-star architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS data platform (ingest → processing → storage → query → API/SDK/UX)
- Establish reference architectures, decision records, and standards
Cloud-Native Platform
- Drive container orchestration, service mesh, control planes, observability, and resilience across AWS/Azure/GCP
Data & Streaming
- Lead designs for high-volume streaming, low-latency query, and analytical/ML use cases (batch + real-time)
AI/ML & Agentic AI
- Partner with product and security to embed responsible LLM/agentic patterns (guardrails, retrieval, evals) into customer-facing and internal developer workflows
Reliability, Security & Compliance
- Champion SRE/SOC2/ISO/GDPR-by-design, error budgets, threat modeling, and secure SDLC
Developer Experience
- Improve CI/CD, test strategy, paved roads, and golden paths; reduce cognitive load and toil across teams
Executive & Customer Influence
- Translate architecture trade-offs for executives and key customers; guide buy-build-integrate decisions
Key Responsibilities
- Author and socialize the product/platform architecture strategy; maintain ADRs and tech radars
- Lead designs for multi-tenant isolation, data models, schemas, indexing/OLAP, and event-driven systems
- Standardize service meshes, API gateways, policy-as-code, and multi-cloud deployment patterns
- Embed SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident learning), capacity planning, and chaos testing
- Lead threat models, data classification, encryption, secrets, key management, and SBOM/SLSA controls
- Define patterns for RAG/agents, prompt & model governance, telemetry, evaluations, and fallbacks
- Coach Staff/Principal engineers and architects; chair architecture reviews; build a healthy review culture
- Communicate options/trade-offs to C-suite; align decisions with business value and customer impact
- 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
- 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
Skills
Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Istio, Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Opensearch, LangChain, MLflow, Airflow
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