Principal Architect

As a principal architect at Plum, you will set the architectural vision and technical strategy for Plum's insurance and healthcare platforms. You'll be responsible for designing highly scalable, resilient, and secure platforms that power our product ecosystem. You'll work closely with engineering, product, business and cross-functional stakeholders to define the technical roadmap, design systems, and ensure our platform is robust and secure for long-term scale while enabling rapid innovation. You'll play a critical role in setting the engineering best practices, mentoring teams, and solving complex architectural challenges across products.

Responsibilities:

• Define and enforce architectural standards, principles, and patterns across services and platforms.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to design scalable, event-driven, and secure systems.
• Work closely with the product and data teams to align engineering goals with business outcomes.
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and performance of mission-critical applications.
• Responsible for the design, architecture, and delivery of a feature or component/product with the highest quality, with high-level directions.
• Driving innovations in the platform constantly and remaining ahead of the curve
• Provide functional, design, and code reviews in related areas of expertise within the team and across teams.
• Mentors/coaches engineers to facilitate their development and provide technical leadership to them.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, and tools to improve developer productivity and system performance.
• Oversee API design principles, ensuring consistency, maintainability, and security across all services.
• Rises above detail to see broader issues and implications for the whole product/team.

Requirements:

• BE/MS in computer science or equivalent.
• 12-15 years of strong design/development experience, including significant time in senior or architect-level roles.
• Proven expertise in at least two backend technology stacks such as Node.js, Java, Python, Go, or similar.
• Deep understanding of frameworks like Express (Node.js ), Spring Boot (Java), Django (Python), or equivalent.
• Strong experience designing and scaling distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices.
• Experience integrating multiple data sources and databases, with a strong grasp of data modelling and performance optimisation.
• Strong understanding of API design, security best practices, and high-throughput data processing.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience and knowledge of open-source software, frameworks and broader cutting-edge technologies.
• Exposure to Gen AI technologies such as OpenAI and Anthropic APIs and frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex; experience with vector databases for retrieval-augmented generation; and familiarity with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, model evaluation, and scalable deployment.
• Superior organisation, communication, interpersonal and leadership skills.
• Must be a proven performer and team player who enjoys challenging assignments in a high-energy, fast-growing and start-up workplace.
• Must be a self-starter who can work well with minimal guidance and in a fluid environment.
• Agility and ability to adapt quickly to changing requirements, scope and priorities.

Skills

amazon web services, aws, azure, gcp, go, google cloud platform, java, microservices, node.js, python