Principal Architect (Hands-On Technical Leader / Individual Contributor)Our client is seeking highly technical, hands-on Principal Architects to serve as the technical owner and domain expert for some of their core business platforms (AI, Data, Benefits, or Wealth Management). This is not a traditional "career architect" or consulting-focused role. They are looking for an accomplished engineers who has progressed into architecture through deep technical expertise and continues to actively build, operate, and improve production systems.
As a Principal Architect, you will provide technical leadership while remaining deeply involved in engineering execution, operational excellence, solution design, platform modernization, and incident response. You will own the overall technology strategy, architecture, reliability, scalability, and delivery outcomes for your domain and partner closely with Engineering, Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Business leaders.
This role requires a strong owner mentality, the ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on implementation, and a commitment to operating mission-critical systems in a highly available environment, including participation in on-call rotations and major incident management.
Key ResponsibilitiesDomain Ownership & Technical Leadership- Serve as the technical owner and subject matter expert for a strategic business domain (AI, Data, Benefits, or Wealth Management).
- Define and drive the long-term technology vision, architecture roadmap, and platform strategy for the domain.
- Establish architectural standards, engineering principles, and best practices that support scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security.
- Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams without direct people-management responsibility.
- Influence technology decisions through technical expertise, collaboration, and a strong engineering mindset.
Hands-On Engineering- Actively participate in architecture design, software development, code reviews, troubleshooting, and platform modernization initiatives.
- Build proofs of concept, reference implementations, and reusable frameworks to accelerate engineering teams.
- Lead the design and implementation of complex distributed systems, APIs, integrations, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native solutions.
- Drive performance optimization, resiliency improvements, automation, and technical debt reduction efforts.
- Partner with engineering teams to ensure architectural decisions are effectively implemented.
Operational Excellence- Maintain accountability for production health, reliability, and operational readiness of the domain.
- Participate in on-call rotations and support critical incident response, outage management, root-cause analysis, and post-mortem activities.
- Establish observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational metrics to achieve high service reliability.
- Drive continuous improvement through automation, resiliency engineering, capacity planning, and operational maturity initiatives.
AI, Data & Platform Modernization- Lead adoption of modern cloud, data, and AI technologies aligned with business objectives.
- Design scalable data platforms, analytics solutions, machine learning workflows, and AI-powered applications where applicable.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and establish architecture patterns that accelerate innovation while managing risk.
- Ensure solutions comply with security, governance, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
Required Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems.
- 3+ years in a Principal Engineer, Principal Architect, Staff+ Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership role.
- Proven track record owning complex enterprise platforms from architecture through production operations.
- Demonstrated ability to influence engineering organizations through technical leadership rather than organizational authority.
- Strong experience operating mission-critical systems with high availability and reliability requirements.
- Experience participating in production support and on-call responsibilities.
Compensation: Up to $210,000 annually
Compensation is based on a range of factors that include relevant experience, knowledge, skills, other job-related qualifications.
