Principal Solution Architect

7-Eleven is an iconic family of brands with over 86,000 locations, surpassing every retailer in the world. We revolutionize convenience, restaurants and fuel through cutting edge innovation — working hard to be the customer's first choice. 7-Eleven empowers our employees to "activate awesome" and make a meaningful impact in their stores and communities every day. If you're ready to grow, lead and make a difference, come join our team and help shape the future of convenience.
7-Eleven’s Store Technology organization is seeking an experienced Principal Architect to lead the technical architecture for point-of-sale and related store technology platforms.

This fully hands-on role supports the POS team through solution design, coding, prototyping, code reviews, troubleshooting, and production issue resolution. The architect partners with Product, Store Operations, Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable software.

The ideal candidate brings deep POS or transaction-processing expertise, strong distributed-systems and cloud-native experience, and the ability to connect enterprise architecture with implementation details.

KEY

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Own the technical vision, target architecture, and architecture roadmap for POS applications, services, integrations, APIs, data, and supporting store technology platforms.

Remain hands-on by writing production-quality code, building prototypes and proofs of concept, troubleshooting complex defects, and contributing to critical implementation work with engineering teams.

Translate business, product, and store requirements into pragmatic solution designs, technical specifications, architecture decision records, and executable delivery plans.

Define and evolve architecture patterns for POS application services, REST APIs, integrations, data access, messaging, event-driven workflows, offline capabilities, and store-to-cloud communication.

Lead architecture, design, code, and technical deep-dive reviews; set engineering standards; and provide clear, actionable guidance that improves software quality and maintainability.

Design transaction-oriented systems for high volume, low latency, strong availability, resiliency, security, and graceful operation during connectivity or downstream service interruptions; define the non-functional requirements needed to support them.

Evaluate technologies, frameworks, platforms, and vendor solutions through hands-on experimentation, benchmarks, technical assessments, and total-cost-of-ownership analysis.

Guide modernization of legacy POS and store systems toward maintainable cloud-native services while managing technical risk, compatibility, migration sequencing, and business disruption.

Partner with Cyber Security and Enterprise Architecture to embed security controls, privacy, compliance, governance, threat modeling, and secure software development practices into solutions.

Drive CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, containerized deployments, automated testing, release engineering, and disciplined environment management.

Work with engineering and operations teams to diagnose incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and improve monitoring, alerting, observability dashboards, and actionable metrics.

Define practical quality engineering strategies across unit, integration, contract, functional, performance, resilience, and regression testing for POS and retail systems.

Mentor engineers and technical leads through design collaboration, pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing; create concise architecture documentation, API contracts, runbooks, release plans, and sustainable handoffs.

Communicate architecture options, trade-offs,…