Principal Software Architect
First seen by Alion on Sep 17, 2026.
Role & Responsibilities :
- Define and drive the overall software architecture, technical strategy, and engineering standards across products and platforms.
- Translate business requirements into scalable, secure, reliable, and maintainable technical solutions.
- Own architecture decisions across application, API, database, cloud, integration, and infrastructure layers.
- Design highly scalable and distributed systems capable of handling growing traffic, data, and business requirements.
- Establish and enforce architectural principles, design patterns, coding standards, and best practices across engineering teams.
- Drive modernization of legacy systems and support cloud adoption, microservices, API-first architecture, and platform engineering where appropriate.
- Review and approve high-level designs, solution architectures, technical specifications, and critical code/design decisions.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, DevOps, Security, Data, and Business teams to align technology decisions with organizational goals.
- Establish practices for observability, availability, disaster recovery, performance, security, and operational resilience.
- Conduct architecture reviews, technical design reviews, and proof-of-concepts for complex technical challenges.
- Maintain clear architecture documentation, system diagrams, technical decision records, and engineering guidelines.
- Stay current with emerging technologies, industry trends, and architectural approaches and assess their applicability to the organization.
- Balance short-term delivery requirements with long-term architectural sustainability, avoiding unnecessary complexity and technical debt.
Preferred Candidate Profile :
- 8 - 10 years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience in designing and building production-grade systems.
- Demonstrated experience in a Software Architect, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Lead Architect, or equivalent senior technical role.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, system design, distributed systems, and design patterns.
- Hands-on experience with one or more modern technology stacks such as Java/Spring Boot, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, or similar.
- Strong knowledge of REST APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, messaging systems, and integration patterns.
- Experience with relational and NoSQL databases and understanding of data modeling, scalability, caching, and database optimization.
- Practical experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent cloud platforms.
- Good understanding of Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and DevOps practices.
- Strong understanding of security, authentication/authorization, API security, data protection, and secure software development practices.
- Experience designing systems for high availability, scalability, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions under ambiguity.
- Strong ownership mindset with the ability to balance architecture quality, business priorities, delivery timelines, and cost.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is preferred.
Skills
Technical Architect, Distributed Systems, System Design, Design Patterns, Java, Spring Boot, .Net, Node.js, REST API, Microservices Architecture, NoSQL