Application Development Architect

OVERVIEW

OnTrac is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Application Development Architect to join our client's Application Development department, part of a leading Google Cloud partner. This is a department role rather than a position on a single customer project: the architect carries billable engagements and pre-sales work concurrently and is expected to act in the best interest of stakeholders and customers across all of them.

This role is ideal for a hands-on architect who owns application architecture on billable customer engagements, supports the Enterprise Cloud Architects (ECAs) in pre-sales by scoping solutions, producing level-of-effort estimates, and defending technical approaches in front of customers, and who leads engineering teams rather than waiting for problems to be escalated.

You will work closely with the ECAs, Application Development leadership, delivery project managers, and customer stakeholders to ensure project success from initial definition through final delivery.

REQUIRED CREDENTIALS

• Professional software engineering and architecture experience with a demonstrated record of operating at a staff or principal level: owning solution architecture for customer engagements and guiding delivery teams
• Production delivery experience on Google Cloud Platform
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Application architecture for cloud-native systems: microservices, API design, event-driven patterns, and data modeling
• Java and Spring Boot depth, with working knowledge of at least one other backend stack such as Node.js/TypeScript or Python
• GCP application services, including Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL or AlloyDB, and IAM
• Design of agentic AI systems on Google Cloud (Gemini models, Google ADK, Vertex AI)
• Pre-sales skills: discovery facilitation, solution scoping, level-of-effort estimation, and technical input to SOWs and proposals
• Authoring technical design documents and architecture diagrams
• Presenting and negotiating technical trade-offs with customer stakeholders
• Leadership of engineering teams: setting technical direction, resolving problems on their own initiative, and developing the engineers around them
• Daily use of AI coding assistants and agentic development tools, and the ability to define how a delivery team uses them
• Security and compliance awareness for enterprise and public-sector environments

USEFUL QUALIFICATIONS

• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect and other Google Cloud Professional certifications
• Workflow or business rules engines (Camunda, Flowable)
• Frontend architecture with React
• Experience building reusable platform components or accelerators across engagements
• Experience in government or regulated environments
• Prior professional services experience at a cloud partner

SCOPE OF WORK

The architect will work across multiple customer engagements and pre-sales opportunities at a time; the scope on any one engagement is set by its SOW and is subject to change.

• Own application architecture on assigned billable engagements, including technical design documents, architecture diagrams, and key implementation decisions, and remain hands-on in the codebase where needed
• Support the ECAs in pre-sales: join discovery sessions, define application development scope, produce level-of-effort estimates and staffing recommendations, and author the application development sections of SOWs and proposals
• Translate SOW scope into an implementation plan and backlog the engineering team can execute, and keep delivery aligned to that scope
• Identify problems in architecture, delivery, or team practice across the engagements you touch and resolve them or drive them to resolution without waiting for escalation
• Act in the best interest of stakeholders and customers when scope, quality, and timeline compete, and bring those conflicts to Application Development leadership and the ECAs early
• Lead the engineering teams on your engagements: set technical direction, review designs and code from L3 and L4 engineers, and develop the engineers around you
• Set and help improve the department's engineering standards, including agent-driven delivery procedures, and carry them across engagements
• Maintain the billable utilization target set by Application Development leadership while carrying pre-sales responsibilities

DETAILS

• Employment type: Full-time
• Location: Remote, United States