Principal System Architect

About the role

The Principal System Architect provides technical direction and hands-on engineering for LI-COR's connected products and cloud platforms. This individual contributor works across instruments, firmware, connectivity, cloud services, data, and applications to build systems that are reliable, secure, scalable, supportable, and economically sustainable. The architect partners with engineering, product, science, quality, IT and DevOps, and external technology partners to turn complex needs into practical technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the target architecture, system boundaries, data models, integration patterns, and technical roadmap for connected products and cloud platforms.
• Lead architecture reviews for services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, identity, applications, deployment patterns, and device-to-cloud communication.
• Simplify the platform by identifying unnecessary coupling, duplicate processing, fragile patterns, and services that should be consolidated, redesigned, or retired.
• Guide platform modernization and the use of managed cloud services based on product needs, customer continuity, cost, portability, security, reliability, and operational burden.
• Maintain architecture decisions and documentation so LI-COR retains the knowledge, access, data portability, and technical control needed to make sound future decisions.
• Guide how devices produce data and how cloud services receive, process, store, and present it, including schemas, batching, retries, deduplication, derived data, and retention.
• Partner with Firmware and Hardware Engineering to identify connectivity, scalability, reliability, support, and cost implications early in product development.
• Review new products and sensor integrations for downstream effects on cloud services, storage, analytics, applications, and cost-to-serve.
• Define end-to-end observability and nonfunctional requirements for availability, performance, security, privacy, scalability, recovery, and supportability.
• Partner with Engineering and IT and DevOps on CI/CD, infrastructure as code, release architecture, incident response, disaster recovery, vulnerability remediation, and operational readiness.
• Provide technical leadership during significant incidents and recurring performance or connectivity issues, driving root cause correction and durable improvement.
• Ensure platform designs support applicable validation, data separation, retention, privacy, auditability, and customer contractual requirements.
• Serve as a technical partner to the Software and Cloud leader and as an architecture authority across engineering, product, science, quality, and operations.
• Remain hands-on through backend design and implementation, prototypes, technical investigations, code reviews, and resolution of high risk production issues.
• Translate product intent into technically complete approaches and communicate tradeoffs, risks, costs, and recommendations to technical teams and business leaders.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen architecture capability across employees and partners so knowledge and decision quality do not depend on one person.
• Act as LI-COR's technical counterpart with cloud, data, connectivity, and engineering partners while business leaders retain commercial and contract authority.

Qualifications

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent demonstrated experience. A master's degree is preferred.

Qualifications:

• Typically 12 or more years of software and cloud engineering experience, including significant experience as a system, solution, platform, or principal architect for production systems.
• Demonstrated architecture ownership for a commercial IoT