Senior Principal Architect

Role Overview

• Define and drive the enterprise architecture strategy, target-state architecture, and multi-year technology roadmap aligned to business objectives and Value Creation Plan (VCP) priorities.
• Establish enterprise architecture principles, guardrails, and standards that improve consistency, scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency across the technology landscape.
• Lead technology strategy for critical modernization initiatives including platform transformation, application rationalization, data architecture evolution, and AI enablement.
• Serve as the architecture authority for the most complex and high-impact technical decisions across the organization.
• Drive the adoption of AI-assisted software delivery practices across Architecture, Product Development, and Engineering teams.
• Define architecture patterns and guardrails for AI-powered applications, agentic workflows, intelligent automation, and Generative AI solutions.
• Partner with engineering organizations to accelerate adoption of AI-first SDLC practices that improve developer productivity, architectural consistency, and delivery speed.
• Establish frameworks that enable architecture artifacts, specifications, governance controls, and design standards to be leveraged by AI-enabled development tools and agents.
• Lead architecture for strategic initiatives spanning multiple business domains, products, teams, and technology platforms.
• Design distributed, cloud-native solutions leveraging microservices, event-driven architecture, API-first design, and domain-driven design principles.
• Define enterprise integration patterns, canonical data models, and platform capabilities that promote reuse and reduce technology fragmentation.
• Ensure architecture decisions support long-term maintainability while enabling rapid business growth and innovation.
• Establish governance processes that improve architectural quality, delivery predictability, risk management, and dependency visibility.
• Lead Architecture Review Boards and Architecture & Design reviews for major initiatives and strategic investments.
• Drive reduction of technical debt through modernization roadmaps, standardization efforts, and measurable engineering quality improvements.
• Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, reliability, resiliency, and operational excellence requirements.
• Mentor Principal Architects, Senior Architects, and engineering leaders, helping elevate architecture capabilities across the organization.
• Contribute to architecture career development, competency frameworks, interviewing standards, and technical leadership growth programs.
• Build reusable architecture assets, reference architectures, decision frameworks, and best practices that can be leveraged across teams.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership while fostering a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends including AI, cloud-native platforms, platform engineering, developer productivity tooling, and intelligent automation.
• Identify opportunities to leverage technology investments to improve business outcomes, operational efficiency, customer experience, and scalability.
• Guide strategic platform and build-versus-buy decisions through architectural and financial analysis.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or technical leadership roles.
• Proven success leading architecture strategy for large-scale, enterprise-grade platforms and distributed systems.
• Experience influencing technology direction across multiple products, business domains, and engineering organizations.
• Deep knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks and architecture governance practices.
• Strong experience designing cloud-native systems on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Expertise in microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, distributed systems, container platforms, and modern integration patterns.
• Strong understanding of data architecture, modern data platforms, data streaming, AI/ML enablement, and analytics ecosystems.
• Experience building highly scalable, highly available, secure systems in complex enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with platform engineering, developer experience (DevEx), and modern software delivery methodologies.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging AI-enabled development practices and AI-assisted SDLC capabilities.
• Understanding of Generative AI architectures, LLM integration patterns, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI agents, and responsible AI principles.
• Experience enabling organizations to adopt AI-driven engineering practices that improve delivery speed, quality, and developer productivity.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence executives, engineering leaders, architects, and product teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive organizational alignment across competing priorities and complex enterprise initiatives.
• Strong strategic thinking, systems thinking, and decision-making skills.
• Proven ability to lead through influence rather than direct authority.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• Distributed Systems
• Microservices
• SDLC

Benefits

• 18 days PTO*
• 11 Holidays (8 company recognized & 3 floating holidays)
• 16 hours per year of paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO)
• Competitive Healthcare
• 401(k) Match: 100% match on the first 3% of your salary, plus 50% match on the next 2%
• Parental Leave: 8 weeks 100% paid by AvidXchange**
• Discounts on Pet, Home, and Auto insurance
• Tuition Reimbursement up to the federal maximum of $5,250***
• Hybrid Workplace Flexibility
• Free parking