Principal Architect

Principal Architect – United Airlines

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Job Overview and Responsibilities

The Principal Architect will be responsible for leading the architectural design and strategy of enterprise applications. The role will lead on the design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance. Work with other architects across the organization and at the enterprise level to build resilient, performant, systems that can handle multiple business capabilities and deliver value. Guide the team on best practices in building large-scale systems.

• Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leaders to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, opinion papers, and architecture decision frameworks that guide the design of technology solutions, especially those requiring integration of applications

• Develop and manage a technical strategy and coordinate adoption

• Architect guidance that conveys best practices and common pitfalls for system design, infrastructure integrations, application development practices, and application runtime principles

• Manage the architecture review process by creating validation checklists, reviewing architectural artifacts, and providing domain-specific guidance to drive architectural alignment across the enterprise

• Design and implement comprehensive end-to-end observability solutions that integrate with key monitoring tools across the technology stack, including Network Node Manager and Thousand Eyes for network monitoring, Quantum Metrics and Dynatrace for application performance management, Big Panda for event correlation, and Service Now CMDB for IT service management, enabling a unified view for proactive monitoring and efficient incident management

• Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet operational requirements such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability. Define requirements and advocate for tooling improvements that reduce manual effort

• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines and observability tools (Dynatrace, Data Dog, Splunk) to ensure efficient software delivery and application reliability

• Conduct research and develop Proof of Concepts on emerging technologies and implementation toolkits in support of anticipated development efforts and recommend technologies that are functionally robust and cost effective

• Research, enforce, and drive the adoption of design patterns throughout the enterprise and evangelize best practices for solution design and development

• Identify new technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and incorporate them into BFS policies & roadmap

• Play a critical role in translating business strategy into technical strategy and define end-to-end technology architectures that support the strategy

• Fine-tune backend configurations to match customer traffic patterns, maintaining the stability and scalability of applications

• Configure applications to collect telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces

Qualifications

What’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor’s degree

• Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field preferred

• 7+ years of relevant experience

• Experience implementing end-to-end observability architecture, with a strong background in managing complex enterprise applications and infrastructure

• Experience with observability and monitoring of enterprise-wide solutions

• Cloud and On-Premise

Infrastructure:
- Expertise in on-premise server provisioning, with a focus on hybrid cloud environments

• Dev Ops and CI/CD:
- Strong knowledge of Dev Ops practices, including CI/CD, automation, and observability tools (Dynatrace, Data Dog, Splunk)

• PCI Compliance:
- Proven experience implementing and…