Description Position at WebMD
About the Role:The Principal Architect, AI-Native Applications is the lead technical authority for how WebMD Ignite designs, builds, and scales modern applications in an AI-native environment. This role defines the architectural patterns, standards, and reference implementations that development teams across the organization build against, with a particular focus on backend systems, data-intensive services, and applications that embed large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows. The Principal Architect operates as a hands-on individual contributor and technical leader, remaining close enough to the code to pair with senior engineers and validate design decisions directly. This is a senior, cross-cutting role that establishes a coherent application architecture practice where design decisions are currently made project by project.
Key Responsibilities:- Define and own the application architecture patterns, standards, and reference implementations that development teams build against across the organization.
- Architect complex backend systems, including microservices architectures, APIs, streaming and event-driven protocols, and data engineering pipelines.
- Design high-performance data platforms for AI workloads, including vector stores, graph databases, distributed caching, and semantic retrieval over million-record corpora.
- Establish the patterns and guardrails for AI-native applications, including LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-model orchestration, and agentic workflows.
- Conduct architecture reviews and ensure solution designs meet scalability, performance, security, interoperability, and cost requirements across both cloud and on-premises environments.
- Set standards for AI-ready APIs, data services, and application frameworks that enable rapid prototyping and production rollout of new capabilities.
- Partner with engineering, product, data, and DevOps leaders to align technical direction with business outcomes and delivery timelines.
- Ensure architectures meet the security, compliance, and privacy requirements of regulated healthcare environments, including HIPAA and the handling of protected health information (PHI).
- Provide technical mentorship to senior engineers and raise the overall architecture fluency of the engineering organization.
Qualifications:- 7+ years of experience in software architecture, backend engineering, or data engineering, including senior or principal-level technical leadership.
- Demonstrated experience architecting complex, distributed backend systems using microservices, APIs, and event-driven or streaming patterns.
- Hands-on experience designing and operating data platforms for high-volume, high-dimensional workloads, including vector databases, graph databases, distributed caching, and semantic retrieval.
- Practical experience building AI-native or AI-enabled applications, including LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, orchestration frameworks, and agentic systems.
- Strong command of cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and experience operating across both cloud and on-premises environments.
- Ability to remain hands-on in code while providing architecture-level leadership.
- Working knowledge of the security, privacy, and compliance requirements of healthcare data environments, including HIPAA and PHI handling.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for both engineering and business audiences.
Preferred Skills:- Experience in a healthcare, health IT, or other regulated data environment.
- Experience operating within HITRUST, NIST, or similar compliance frameworks.
- Familiarity with modern warehouse/lakehouse and high-performance analytical data platforms.
- Experience defining developer tooling, standards, and AI-assisted software development workflows.
Compensation: $150,000 - $200,000Bonus Eligible:This position is also eligible for a discretionary company bonus, based upon business results.Benefits: Employees in this position are eligible to participate in the company sponsored benefit programs, including the following within the first 12 months of employment:- Health Insurance (medical, dental, and vision coverage)
- Paid Time Off (including vacation, sick leave, and flexible holiday days)
- 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer matching
- Life and Disability Insurance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Commuter and/or Transit Benefits (if applicable)
Eligibility for specific benefits may vary based on job classification, schedule (e.g., full-time vs. part-time), work location and length of employment. 
