Principal Enterprise Architect – Platforms, DevOps, SRE, Microservices, Event‑Driven Architecture, App, Data & Cloud - Onsite

About the role

The role serves as the senior-most architecture leader across platforms, applications, data, and cloud. It sets the strategic direction for the next-generation digital ecosystem, including microservices, event-driven architecture, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. The role also leads a team of architects and drives both architecture strategy and people leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the enterprise architecture vision, blueprint, and multi-year roadmap.
• Lead execution of modern architectural patterns including domain-driven design, microservices, event-driven integration, cloud-native platforms, and API-first ecosystems.
• Head the Architecture Review Board (ARB); establish decision frameworks and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Directly lead and manage a team of architects, providing coaching, 1:1s, performance development, and career growth.
• Build and mature the architecture practice, including standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, templates, and best practices.
• Foster a strong culture of collaboration, continuous learning, technical excellence, and psychological safety across architecture and engineering.
• Provide thought leadership and partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, and Infrastructure leadership to drive alignment.
• Support the recruitment, onboarding, and development of top architecture talent; identify skill gaps and create development plans.
• Define the enterprise strategy for DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, GitOps, and platform engineering ("golden paths" and self-service developer platforms).
• Establish and enforce SRE practices—SLO/SLI definitions, error budgets, observability, incident response, resilience engineering, and performance/scalability patterns.
• Drive adoption of Zero Downtime, Canary, Blue/Green, and progressive delivery strategies.
• Lead cloud strategy and architecture: multi-account landing zones, networking, service mesh, identity, secrets, encryption, policy-as-code, DR/HA, and FinOps optimization.
• Oversee data architecture patterns (streaming pipelines, CDC, lake/lakehouse, governance, lineage, quality, cataloging).
• Ensure alignment with enterprise security standards and partner with security architecture on threat modeling, secure design, and compliance.
• Provide architectural oversight for key programs—review designs, approve patterns, unblock teams, and support high-risk technical initiatives.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership and senior business stakeholders.
• Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and impacts clearly to executives and delivery teams.

  Qualifications

  • Minimum Degree Required: Bachelor's Degree
  • 12–15+ years in software/architectural leadership roles; 5+ years leading other architects or senior engineers.
  • Proven experience delivering cloud-native, microservices, and event-driven systems at scale.
  • Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), CI/CD pipelines, IaC (Terraform/Bicep), and observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
  • Strong understanding of data platforms (relational, NoSQL, caching, streaming), event streaming platforms (Kafka/Kinesis/PubSub), and API frameworks (REST/GraphQL/gRPC).
  • Demonstrated success mentoring architects, guiding teams through ambiguity, and uplifting engineering maturity.
  • Strong communication, cross-functional leadership, and executive presentation skills.