Principal Architect

Our client is seeking highly technical, hands-on Principal Architects to serve as the technical owner and domain expert for some of their core business platforms (AI, Data, Benefits, or Wealth Management). This is not a traditional “career architect” or consulting-focused role. They are looking for accomplished engineers who have progressed into architecture through deep technical expertise and continue to actively build, operate, and improve production systems.

Responsibilities

• Domain Ownership & Technical Leadership
  • Serve as the technical owner and subject matter expert for a strategic business domain (AI, Data, Benefits, or Wealth Management).
  • Define and drive the long-term technology vision, architecture roadmap, and platform strategy for the domain.
  • Establish architectural standards, engineering principles, and best practices that support scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security.
  • Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams without direct people-management responsibility.
  • Influence technology decisions through technical expertise, collaboration, and a strong engineering mindset.
• Hands-On Engineering
  • Actively participate in architecture design, software development, code reviews, troubleshooting, and platform modernization initiatives.
  • Build proofs of concept, reference implementations, and reusable frameworks to accelerate engineering teams.
  • Lead the design and implementation of complex distributed systems, APIs, integrations, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native solutions.
  • Drive performance optimization, resiliency improvements, automation, and technical debt reduction efforts.
  • Partner with engineering teams to ensure architectural decisions are effectively implemented.
• Operational Excellence
  • Maintain accountability for production health, reliability, and operational readiness of the domain.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and support critical incident response, outage management, root-cause analysis, and post-mortem activities.
  • Establish observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational metrics to achieve high service reliability.
  • Drive continuous improvement through automation, resiliency engineering, capacity planning, and operational maturity initiatives.
• AI, Data & Platform Modernization
  • Lead adoption of modern cloud, data, and AI technologies aligned with business objectives.
  • Design scalable data platforms, analytics solutions, machine learning workflows, and AI-powered applications where applicable.
  • Evaluate emerging technologies and establish architecture patterns that accelerate innovation while managing risk.
  • Ensure solutions comply with security, governance, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems.
• 3+ years in a Principal Engineer, Principal Architect, Staff+ Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership role.
• Proven track record owning complex enterprise platforms from architecture through production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering organizations through technical leadership rather than organizational authority.
• Strong experience operating mission-critical systems with high availability and reliability requirements.
• Experience participating in production support and on-call responsibilities.

Pay

Up to $210,000 annually. Compensation is based on a range of factors that include relevant experience, knowledge, skills, and other job-related qualifications.