Job Description

Your Role

The Stellarus Technology team builds and operates the platform for payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, pharma workflows, internal products, and marketplace capabilities. The Principal, Application Architecture will report to the Senior Director, Application Architecture. In this role, you will lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, and turn platform strategy into systems that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, and operate.

The platform is built around domain-owned microservices, reusable APIs, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, and a marketplace of capabilities that can be composed across customers and product lines.

This is a senior individual-contributor architecture role. You will own architecture direction for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, resolve high-impact technical risks and cross-team design conflicts, and stay close enough to the code and system design to make that direction credible to engineers. This role has overlap with enterprise architecture, and a background in enterprise architecture is a plus, but the work is closer to the code, system design, engineering execution, AI development improvements, vendor integration, and production tradeoffs than to enterprise architecture theater.

Stellarus generally takes a build-over-buy approach when the capability is core to our platform. This role will drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions for the platform capabilities it owns, and help teams design products for payer, provider, pharma, and partner workflows.

Responsibilities

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Define application architecture direction for major platform capabilities, reusable services, and cross-domain technical initiatives.
• Lead architecture decisions for service decomposition, API ecosystems, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, marketplace enablement, and shared platform capabilities.
• Partner with senior engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and business stakeholders to align architecture with platform strategy.
• Drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions that improve speed, scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Stay hands-on enough to review designs, read code, evaluate pull requests when needed, reason through incidents, and help teams make concrete technical decisions.
• Establish architecture standards and review practices that improve design quality, production readiness, security, observability, and operational ownership.
• Resolve high-impact technical risks, cross-team dependencies, design conflicts, and complex platform tradeoffs.
• Create reusable architecture frameworks, decision models, reference patterns, and AI-enabled guidance that improve engineering consistency.
• Establish patterns for customer-isolated data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, pharma workflows, partner integrations, and marketplace enablement across the Stellarus platform.
• Mentor senior engineers, architects, and technical leads to raise the quality of technical judgment, documentation, and architecture execution.
• Document decisions and create patterns for AI tools and developers to operate efficiently: decision records, reference diagrams, API standards, service templates, AI skills, and architecture review notes.

Qualifications

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or High School Diploma/GED and 4 years of additional relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
• 10+ years of software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical experience.
• Experience leading application architecture for distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices, internal platforms, or modernization initiatives.
• Strong hands-on engineering background with the ability to guide service design, API contracts, code structure, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production tradeoffs.
• Deep experience with domain-driven design, service decomposition, integration architecture, shared services, customer extensions, and reusable platform patterns.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate platform strategy into clear architecture direction and execution standards.
• Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment. Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
• Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, event contracts, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant/customer isolation, and auditability.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
• Healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated-industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platform experience is strongly preferred.
• Enterprise architecture experience is a plus, especially when paired with hands-on application architecture and delivery execution.
• Excellent written communication. You can make architecture decisions clear, concise, and useful to the teams who need to execute them.

About the Team

About Stellarus and the Ascendiun Family of Companies

Stellarus, launched in January 2025, is designed to scale innovative healthcare solutions that support customers in creating a health care experience deserving of their family, friends, and neighbors.

Stellarus is part of a family of organizations that is overseen by a nonprofit corporate entity named Ascendiun. The Ascendiun Family of Companies also includes Blue Shield of California and its subsidiary, Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan and Altais, a clinical services company.

Stellarus' vision is to empower its customers to create a healthcare experience that is worthy of their family, friends, and neighbors. Stellarus' objective is to offer innovative, modern, scalable solutions that challenge the health care status quo. This very closely aligns with Blue Shield of California's vision by using innovation to improve quality, affordability, and experience for members.

To achieve our mission, we foster an environment where all employees can thrive and contribute fully to address the needs of the various communities we serve. We are committed to creating and maintaining a supportive workplace that upholds our values and advances our goals.

Our Values:

At Stellarus, our core values of agility, trust, drive, courage and service shape our approach to developing innovative product offerings.

Our Workplace Model:

We believe in fostering a workplace environment that balances purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility - providing clear expectations while respecting the diverse needs of our workforce. Our workplace model is designed around intentional in-person interaction, collaboration, connection, creativity and flexibility:

• For most teams, this means coming into the office two days per week.
• Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location, out of state employees, and employees in certain member-facing roles should work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.
• For employees with medical conditions that may impact their ability to work in-office, we are committed to engaging in an interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to ensure their work environment is conducive to their success and well-being.

The Company reserves the right to require more presence in the office based on business needs, and requirements are subject to change with periodic reviews.

Physical Requirements:

Office Environment - roles involving part to full time schedule in Office Environment. Based in our physical offices and work from home office/deskwork - Activity level: Sedentary, frequency most of work day.

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