Principal Architect

seeks an experienced and visionary Principal Architect to lead the architecture strategy for a transformative, multi-portfolio & multi-system program in a leading automotive company. The Principal Architect will play a critical role in driving architectural progress, aligning cross-functional teams, and ensuring a seamless, integrated customer journey across platforms, and will serve as the strategic technical leader, interfacing with multiple business units, partner architects, and product teams.

Key Responsibilities

 

• Define, evolve, and communicate the architecture vision and roadmap across different teams.
• Lead architectural strategy for customer data integration and unified customer experience initiatives.
• Design and guide the implementation of modern, event-driven, cloud-native architectures, primarily using AWS and complementary technologies.
• Review and lead integration architecture involving APIs, messaging frameworks, SSO, and canonical data models.
• Collaborate with Customer Experience, Dealer Experience, Marketing Tech, and Analytics teams to deliver scalable and resilient solutions.
• Provide strategic and tactical technical leadership, helping mitigate architectural risks and resolving cross-team disagreements on complex trade-offs.
• Define and promote JSON-based canonical data models to ensure consistency and interoperability.
• Guide development teams across Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, and related frameworks.
• Represent architecture in high-level stakeholder meetings, gaining consensus across technical and business audiences.
• Mentor solution architects and contribute to enterprise-wide architecture standards and patterns.
  
   

Required Skills & Qualifications

 

• Strong experience in enterprise or solution architecture, including experience across multiple tech stacks and cloud platforms.
• Proven expertise in AWS cloud architecture, including compute, storage, networking, and security services.
• Deep understanding of event-driven, microservices-based, and API-first architectures.
• Strong knowledge of integration patterns, canonical data modeling, and messaging frameworks (e.g., Kafka, MQ).
• Hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, and JSON schema modeling.
• Familiarity with security, system resilience, and disaster recovery best practices.
• Excellent communication and business-facing presentation skills.
• Experience working across diverse technologies and domains, including customer data platforms.
• Ability to gain consensus among architects and stakeholders in complex or ambiguous technical situations.
• Strong understanding of architectural review processes and ability to propose alternative solutions or remediation plans when necessary.
• Strategic thinker with hands-on technical leadership.
• Comfortable navigating multi-portfolio, multi-system environments.
• Collaborative and confident in leading cross-functional architecture discussions.
• Strong communicator, able to bridge technical depth with executive-level clarity.
• Experience in automotive or financial services domains is a strong plus