We’re looking for an Application Domain Lead to shape how software is designed and delivered across the enterprise. This senior individual contributor role sits within Enterprise Architecture and connects architecture direction with practical engineering execution. You will define reusable patterns, standards, and guidance that help teams make consistent technical decisions, embed non-functional requirements early, and build secure, reliable systems without unnecessary friction. 

You Might Be Who We're Looking For If... 

• You’re the person on your current team who sees the same architectural mistakes repeated across squads and wants to solve them once, at the pattern level. You’ve spent years designing and building distributed systems, and you’ve seen good teams make avoidable decisions when they did not have clear, practical guidance. 

• You stay close to the work. You can evaluate trade-offs at the whiteboard and in a pull request, and you’ve built reference architectures or pattern guidance that teams adopted. You’re comfortable engaging in detailed architecture discussions and helping teams identify the patterns they should use. 

• You’ve operated without formal authority and earned trust through technical depth, clear thinking, and a track record of enabling rather than blocking. You know how to guide teams through competing priorities, exception requests, and concerns about standardization while helping the organization move toward consistent, practical patterns. 

• You're comfortable working across diverse teams and technologies, quickly learning new languages, tools, and platforms while championing approaches that benefit the broader organization.

Role Overview: 

• Own the enterprise application pattern library and help teams apply standards consistently across service boundaries, integration, resilience, and fault tolerance. 

• Establish practical NFR guidance, including reliability targets, SLO/SLI design, performance baselines, and observability expectations. 

• Create reference architectures, starter templates, and decision guides that make recommended choices easier to understand and apply. 

• Help teams learn and adopt AI-enabled SDLC practices, including responsible use of coding assistants, architecture decision support, testing acceleration, and secure delivery guardrails. 

• Partner with the Web Enablement team, promoting understanding and consistent adoption of PDS, NSK, and WSK. 

• Partner with platform engineering and security teams to embed secure-by-design practices into APIs, service communication, secret management, and delivery pipelines. 

• Guide modernization efforts across cloud migration, platform consolidation, API modernization, and legacy decomposition. 

In this role, you will focus on four outcomes: setting practical application standards, driving architecture consistency, enabling engineering teams, and building security and reliability into delivery from the start. 

Set practical application standards 

• Define and maintain the enterprise application pattern library, covering both functional architecture (domain decomposition, service boundaries, data ownership) and non-functional requirements (availability, latency, throughput, fault tolerance). 

• Establish NFR baselines for reliability, performance, availability, and observability, so they are built into reusable patterns. 

• Author authoritative guidance on integration patterns, event-driven architecture, and API design that teams can adopt without ambiguity. 

Drive architecture consistency 

• Help product squads, domains, and platform teams apply patterns consistently without creating bottlenecks. 

• Use architecture reviews to reinforce good patterns, surface drift early, and coach teams toward convergence. 

• Maintain the architecture decision record process, so important technical decisions are documented, reviewed, and traceable. 

Enable engineering teams 

• Create reference architectures, starter templates, and decision guides that are easy for teams to adopt. 

• Reduce ambiguity by making recommended architecture choices clear, practical, and repeatable. 

• Run enablement sessions, office hours, and working groups that help standards become part of normal engineering practice. 

Build security and reliability in from the start 

• Embed secure-by-design practices into application patterns from the beginning, not as a late-stage review activity. 

• Build reliability and observability expectations into architecture patterns through SLOs, SLIs, and measurable operating targets. 

• Partner with platform and security teams on shared patterns for service mesh, API gateway, secret management, and pipeline controls. 

Lead modernization through partnership 

• Represent application architecture in cloud migration, platform consolidation, API modernization, and legacy decomposition efforts. 

• Work with product, data, security, and platform leaders to align architecture decisions with business capability roadmaps. 

• Earn trust through technical depth, clear guidance, and a bias toward helping teams move faster while improving consistency, security, and reliability. 

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in a domain or enterprise architecture capacity 
• Deep command of distributed systems design, microservices patterns, and cloud-native architecture on AWS 

• Demonstrated ability to build pattern libraries and reference architectures  

• Experience embedding NFRs such as reliability, performance, and security into architecture patterns 

• Strong communication skills: able to write architecture guidance that is precise without being prescriptive 

• Track record of earning technical trust across engineering teams without formal authority 

Technical Requirements:

• Distributed systems design — DDD, microservices, event-driven architecture, CQRS, saga patterns, hexagonal architecture 

• Cloud-native architecture on AWS — EKS, Fargate, Lambda, Aurora, DynamoDB, EventBridge, SQS/SNS 

• NFR patterns — circuit breakers, bulkheads, retry/backoff, rate limiting, graceful degradation, SLO/SLI design 

• API design and governance — REST, gRPC, API versioning, contract-first development 

• CI/CD and observability — GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, structured logging 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Primary languages: Java Spring Boot, Node.js, and Python, with enough fluency to read code, review implementation choices, and evaluate architectural trade-offs without needing to be the primary engineer. 

• Emerging stacks: TypeScript (full-stack), Rust (performance-critical)  

• Security patterns: service mesh, API gateway security, secret management, SAST/DAST, policy-as-code 

• Network architecture: VPC design, PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, WAF/Shield 

• GraphQL federation — active in parts of the portfolio 

Skills that will help you stand out:

• AI/ML integration patterns — LLM embedding, RAG architectures, model abstraction layers, agentic workflow design 

• Modernization strategy — strangler fig, anti-corruption layers, data sync for monolith decomposition 

• Data mesh — domain data ownership, data product interfaces, federated governance 

• Platform transitions — EventBridge migration and API Gateway modernization (both in-flight) 

The following salary ranges reflect market-specific compensation for this position across multiple job levels. Candidates will be evaluated to determine the appropriate job level based on their skills and experience. 

• AD- Enterprise Architecture: $145,000 - $170,000 / year
• Director-Enterprise Architecture: $160,000 - $190,000 / year

Work Environment

This role offers in-office, hybrid (blending at least three office days in a typical workweek), and remote work arrangements (only if residing more than 30 miles from Des Moines, IA, Raleigh, NC, or Charlotte, NC). You’ll work with your leader to figure out which option may align best based on several factors.

Job Level

We’ll consider talent at the Assistant Director level and Director-Enterprise Architecture level with the right experience and skills.

Work Authorization/Sponsorship

At this time, we're not considering candidates that need any type of immigration sponsorship now or in the future or those needing work authorization for this role. (This includes, but is not limited to students on F1-OPT, F1-CPT, J-1, etc.) 

Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants

Investment Code of Ethics

For Principal Global Investors positions, you’ll need to follow an Investment Code of Ethics related to personal and business conduct as well as personal trading activities for you and members of your household. These same requirements may also apply to other positions across the organization.

Experience Principal

At Principal, we value connecting on both a personal and professional level. Together, we’re imagining a more purpose-led future for financial services – and that starts with you. Our success depends on the unique experiences, backgrounds, and talents of our employees. And we support our employees the same way we support our customers: with comprehensive, competitive benefit offerings crafted to protect their physical, financial, and social well-being. Check out our careers site to learn more about our purpose, values and benefits.

Principal is an Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

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