Principal Architect

Overview

Principal Architect

Reports to:
Chief Revenue Officer

The Principal Architect plays a critical role in shaping the technical direction of customer solutions, with a strong focus on business development, pre-sales engagement, and proposal technical leadership. This role partners closely with sales, product, and engineering leadership to define solution architectures that win business, differentiate our offerings, and align with customer objectives.

The Principal Architect contributes across the opportunity lifecycle — from early customer conversations and bid/proposal development through architectural governance and technical oversight — ensuring solutions are scalable, compliant (SOC 2, PCI-DSS), and commercially viable. While not primarily delivery-oriented, the role maintains architectural accountability to ensure proposed solutions are realistic, supportable, and aligned with our long-term platform strategy and cloud cost controls.

As a senior technical leader, you will influence architectural standards, guide technical decision-making, and act as a trusted advisor to both internal stakeholders and customers. You will remain hands-on with our technology stacks as needed to validate designs and support high-impact initiatives

Business Development & Pre-Sales Leadership

• Act as a technical authority in customer engagements, supporting sales and account teams during discovery, solution definition, and proposal development.
  • Translate customer business problems into compelling, technically sound solution architectures.
  • Lead the technical response for bids, RFPs, and proposals, including architecture diagrams, technical narratives, and compliance responses.
  • Assess technical risk, feasibility, and cost drivers early in the sales cycle to support accurate scoping and pricing.
  • Present and defend architectural approaches to customer technical and executive stakeholders.

Architectural Leadership

• Define and evolve the architectural vision and reference architectures aligned to business strategy and market needs.
  • Provide architectural governance to ensure proposed and delivered solutions adhere to best practices, security standards, and platform strategy.
  • Advocate for modern architectural principles including cloud-native design, CI/CD, microservices, and reuse.
  • Serve as a senior escalation point for complex architectural decisions and trade-offs.

Solution Design

• Collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to align solution designs with roadmap, delivery capabilities, and customer value.
  • Design scalable, resilient architectures for complex, data-intensive cloud systems.
  • Ensure proposed solutions account for non-functional requirements such as security, performance, compliance, and operational cost.
  • Conduct architectural reviews to ensure alignment between proposed solutions, delivery approaches, and long-term platform sustainability.

Technology Strategy & Evaluation

• Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive offerings.
  • Evaluate new platforms, tools, and approaches, recommending adoption based on business value, differentiation, and architectural fit.
  • Influence technology investment decisions by articulating trade-offs between innovation, risk, and cost.

Collaboration & Influence

• Work closely with sales, product management, engineering leadership, and delivery teams to ensure continuity from proposal through execution.
  • Partner with technical leads and project managers to validate assumptions, dependencies, and high-level delivery approaches.
  • Influence corporate direction for software development practices, architectural standards, and technology selection.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Teach and communicate architectural and technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Mentor architects and senior engineers in architectural thinking, design patterns, and decision-making.
  • Facilitate cross-team technical discussions and resolution of complex architectural issues.
  • Promote a pragmatic engineering culture focused on quality, sustainability, and “fix once properly.”

This list of responsibilities might not…