Principal Software Architect

Responsibilities:

Architecture & SDLC Assurance:

• Review and approve architectural designs for major features and systems before development begins.
• Create and maintain Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) documenting important technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Establish and enforce engineering quality gates across the software development lifecycle.
• Review technical designs for scalability, security, maintainability, reliability, and alignment with enterprise standards.
• Ensure architectural decisions can be traced through implementation, testing, and deployment.

Quality, Testing & Production Readiness:

• Define minimum testing and code-quality standards across mobile, web, and backend applications.
• Review test strategies for major features and ensure critical functionality is adequately tested.
• Establish production-readiness requirements covering deployment automation, monitoring, security scanning, load testing, rollback procedures, and incident response.
• Review CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes configurations, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment processes.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews and identify systemic technical or architectural problems.

Reliability, Observability & Scalability:

• Establish observability standards covering structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, monitoring, and alerting.
• Define and review Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and production performance targets.
• Lead or review load and performance testing for critical backend services.
• Identify scalability bottlenecks across databases, caching, infrastructure, networking, and application services.
• Review database designs, migrations, indexing, caching strategies, and performance considerations.

Security & API Governance:

• Establish engineering security gates covering dependency scanning, SAST, container scanning, authentication, authorization, encryption, and API security.
• Participate in security design reviews for new systems.
• Ensure critical security findings are addressed or formally risk-accepted before production releases.
• Enforce API versioning, backward compatibility, contract testing, and safe deprecation practices.
• Review REST, GraphQL, and gRPC/API contract designs where applicable.

Technical Governance & Mentorship:

• Maintain the organisation's approved technology stack and technology radar.
• Evaluate requests for new frameworks, libraries, tools, and technologies.
• Conduct periodic technology-health reviews covering dependencies, vulnerabilities, technical debt, and engineering quality.
• Mentor Engineering Leads and senior engineers on architecture, design thinking, and technical decision-making.
• Maintain accessible technical documentation and architecture decision logs.
• Lead architecture knowledge-sharing sessions and technical office hours.

Continuous Improvement:

• Identify opportunities to improve engineering processes, reliability, quality, and delivery efficiency.
• Evaluate and introduce appropriate engineering practices such as contract testing, feature flags, chaos engineering, and SLO-driven development.
• Document lessons learned from successful projects and production incidents.
• Contribute to the organisation's technical thought leadership through internal documentation, technical articles, open-source contributions, or industry events.

Requirements:

• A minimum of 7–9 years of professional software engineering experience.
• At least 3 years in a software architecture, staff/principal engineering, or senior technical leadership role.
• Demonstrated experience reviewing and making architectural and technical decisions for production systems.
• Strong understanding of the complete software development lifecycle.
• Hands-on experience establishing testing, quality assurance, release, or engineering governance practices.
• Strong knowledge of at least three of the following: React / TypeScript, React Native, Flutter, Node.js, Java, C#/.NETGo
• Strong backend architecture and distributed-systems knowledge.
• Experience with microservices, asynchronous messaging, database optimisation, caching, and scalable system design.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps practices.
• Experience with security scanning, dependency management, and production security controls.
• Experience investigating production incidents and performance bottlenecks.
• Experience conducting technical design reviews and mentoring senior engineers.

The organisation currently works with technologies including:

• Web: React, TypeScript
• Mobile: React Native, Flutter
• Backend: Node.js, Java, C#/.NET, Go
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis
• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, CloudWatch, Datadog, or equivalent
• Security: SAST, dependency scanning, container security tools

Nice to Have:

• Experience with chaos engineering.
• Strong Kubernetes or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• GraphQL architecture or federation experience.
• Data warehouse or analytics pipeline architecture experience.
• IoT or embedded systems experience.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects.
• Experience writing technical articles or speaking at engineering events.

What Success Looks Like:

• Success in this role means engineering teams can move quickly without compromising system quality, security, reliability, or maintainability.

You will be expected to:

• Ensure major architectural decisions receive appropriate technical review.
• Improve software quality and reduce production defect escape rates.
• Strengthen security and production-readiness practices.
• Improve system observability and reliability.
• Identify and address architectural and technical debt.
• Help Engineering Leads and senior engineers make better technical decisions.
• Introduce engineering improvements that produce measurable results.