Principal Software Architect

Principal Software Architect

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior technical leadership for a SaaS platform
• Focus: Architecture direction across backend, frontend, data pipelines, integrations, and delivery practices
• Onsite: Reading, PA

Description

The Principal Software Architect will set and evolve the platform’s technical architecture and long-term roadmap, guiding scalable, secure, and resilient systems. The platform uses Java and Spring Boot, React, Apache Kafka-based data pipelines, and Snowflake, with extensive third-party integrations. You will also evaluate and responsibly integrate AI and large language model technologies where they provide measurable product and engineering value.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the platform technical architecture and roadmap aligned with product goals (scale, reliability, security, cost)
• Provide technical leadership for backend services (Java/Spring Boot) and frontend applications (React)
• Design event-driven architectures and high-throughput data pipelines using Apache Kafka
• Guide data architecture and integration patterns involving Snowflake and other analytical systems
• Lead architecture for complex third-party integrations (API design, authentication, data mapping, reliability, versioning, failure handling)
• Establish architectural standards for service boundaries, data contracts, observability, security, and performance
• Strengthen CI/CD practices, deployment automation, testing strategy, and release reliability
• Collaborate with product, data, security, operations, and engineering leaders to evaluate tradeoffs
• Review designs and mentor engineers/technical leads to raise engineering quality across teams
• Identify and address technical risks, architectural debt, scalability constraints, and operational bottlenecks
• Evaluate AI/LLM technologies and lead practical, secure integration (product or engineering workflows)
• Communicate technical strategy, options, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Requirements

• Significant experience designing and evolving production software architectures, including principal/staff or equivalent senior technical leadership experience
• Hands-on background with Java and Spring Boot in distributed, production-scale systems
• Experience with React and modern web application architecture
• Proven experience designing event-driven systems and large-scale streaming/data pipelines using Apache Kafka
• Strong understanding of cloud data warehousing concepts with practical Snowflake experience
• Demonstrated success architecting and operating integrations with multiple third-party platforms and APIs
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, deployment strategies, and production operations
• Experience building SaaS products, including multi-tenancy, security, availability, scalability, and serviceability considerations
• Ability to lead through technical influence and collaborate across organizational boundaries
• Excellent communication, decision-making, and technical documentation skills

Benefits

Not specified in the provided posting.