Principal Architect

Define, launch, and lead the ITP architecture guild as the cross-organization community of practice for architects and senior engineers, owning its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms so that standards, patterns, tools, and lessons learned scale across teams. - Set and evolve architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technology choices, and guardrails that enable consistent, high-quality decisions and reduce ambiguity and rework across teams. - Drive AI adoption and transformation through architecture, defining the AI-first reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails (agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI) that teams across ITP, CSS, CSU, and MCAPS use to adopt AI safely and consistently. - Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, engineering, and product groups so that a single architecture practice spans planning, funding, design, delivery, and operations. - Develop, run, and continuously improve the architecture review process, including intake and triage criteria, objective quality bars, the reviewer pool, architecture decision records, escalation paths, and measures of adoption, cycle time, and outcome quality. - Lead reviews of the most consequential products and programs, ensuring decisions are documented with context, options, tradeoffs, risks, and rejected alternatives, and are understood, implemented, measured, and revisited as conditions change. - Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking logical architectures spanning domains, capabilities, bounded contexts, services, data flows, integrations, APIs, identity, security boundaries, and user or system interaction patterns. - Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking physical architectures spanning deployment topology, compute, storage, networking, data platforms, service placement, geographic distribution, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, capacity, and operational supportability. - Coach teams in translating functional and nonfunctional requirements into architecture specifications and diagrams that move from enterprise and system context to detailed component, data, network, identity, and deployment views. - Aid in the development of a pro-code golden path: the paved, opinionated, well-documented set of languages, frameworks, platform services, templates, scaffolding, and CI/CD pipelines that represent the supported way to build and ship software in ITP. - Aid in the development of the golden loop: an instrumented inner and outer developer loop spanning local development, AI-assisted coding, code review, test, build, deploy, monitor, and feedback, so that velocity, quality, and developer experience are measurable and continuously improved. - Mentor software engineers across levels, including principal and senior engineers and architects, through design coaching, code and design reviews, pairing, and career guidance, raising architectural capability across the organization - Prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems facing the organization and validate high-risk or novel design elements through working prototypes, benchmarks, modeling, simulations, and technical spikes before teams commit to irreversible paths. - Contribute production-quality reference implementations, templates, and sample code that make the golden path concrete and immediately usable by engineering teams. - Identify architectural gaps, design cliffs, concentration risks, systemic dependencies, obsolete technologies, and accumulated technical debt, and prioritize investments that improve long-term agility and reduce operational and business risk. - Define target-state architecture and sequenced transition roadmaps that connect the current state to the target state through practical, incremental steps while maintaining compatibility, service continuity, and customer trust. - Help teams balance tradeoffs across reliability, security, privacy, safety, accessibility, performance, scalability, sustainability, maintainability, time to market, and total cost of ownership. - Use telemetry, capacity and cost models, reliability data, security findings, incident learnings, customer feedback, and technology-market signals to evaluate architecture health and guide continuous evolution. - Communicate complex architectures and decisions in terms appropriate for engineering, business, and executive audiences, and build trusted technical relationships with senior leaders, customers, and partners. Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. Extensive experience defining logical and physical architectures for large-scale, business-critical enterprise products, platforms, cloud services, or distributed systems. Demonstrated success defining future-state architecture and delivering multi-year transformation or modernization roadmaps across multiple engineering teams or organizational boundaries.

establishing and governing architecture principles, design standards, reference architectures, patterns, guardrails, architecture decision records, and technical review practices.

Deep understanding of software and distributed-systems design, including service boundaries, APIs, integration patterns, data architecture, identity, networking, deployment topology, resiliency, observability, and operational supportability.

translating business, customer, functional, and nonfunctional requirements into implementable architecture specifications, diagrams, decisions, and sequenced delivery plans.

making and communicating complex tradeoffs involving reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, and delivery speed.

Demonstrated ability to lead and influence senior technical and business stakeholders across organizations without relying on formal reporting authority.

Demonstrated ability to embrace change, push boundaries, and continuously improve how teams design, build, and operate software.

Hands-on technical experience sufficient to validate designs through prototypes, implementation reviews, code reviews, benchmarks, modeling, or direct work with engineering and operations teams.

applying AI-first development practices, such as AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, and AI-driven testing and code review, and building them into golden paths and standards that teams adopt by default.

using operational evidence, including telemetry, incidents, capacity, cost, security findings, and customer signals, to assess architecture health and guide investment decisions.

Deep expertise in one or more of the following: cloud platform architecture, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, AI systems, security architecture, networking, developer platforms, or large-scale service engineering.

modernizing mature or legacy environments through transition architectures, platform seams, domain decomposition, interface evolution, data migration, and incremental replacement strategies.

designing platforms and products that span multiple clouds, regions, regulatory boundaries, partner ecosystems, or heterogeneous technology environments.

with cloud-native and AI-era architecture patterns, including container orchestration, event-driven systems, API platforms, data and model governance, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and Responsible AI controls.

Demonstrated record of anticipating technology shifts and converting emerging capabilities into pragmatic architecture strategy, standards, and investment recommendations.

developing architecture maturity models, conformance measures, quality scorecards, automated policy or standards validation, and mechanisms for measuring adoption and effectiveness.

Exceptional systems thinking, problem solving, negotiation, written communication, executive presentation, and technical storytelling skills.

building and leading an architecture guild, architecture review board, or similar community of practice that sets standards and raises engineering capability across multiple teams.

defining a pro-code golden path and an instrumented inner and outer developer loop, including platform engineering, templates, scaffolding, CI/CD, AI-assisted development, and developer-experience measurement.

Track record of mentoring software engineers and of prototyping solutions to hard engineering problems under production-relevant conditions.

Relevant architecture or cloud certifications are beneficial but do not substitute for demonstrated architectural judgment and delivery impact.