Principal Application Architect

Powering the agentic revolution in travel. Sabre is an AI-native technology leader, backed by one of the world’s largest travel data clouds. Built on an open, modular, cloud-native architecture, Sabre serves as the backbone for both established leaders and bold, new disruptors, guiding them to the next age of travel retailing through intelligent, connected, and personalized experiences. With AI at its core and operating at unparalleled scale, Sabre transforms insights into innovation, empowering airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel worldwide.

Location: Kraków (hybrid work - 3 day per week in the office)

Principal Application Architect - Nova Team

Role Overview

Sabre is seeking an experienced Principal Application Architect to support the Nova Team, a strategic engineering group within the Customer Identity and Access Solutions (CIAS) organization. Nova is responsible for driving platform modernization, cloud-native transformation, and architectural excellence across CIAS’s most critical identity and access platforms.

This role reports to the Senior Director of Software Engineering and operates as a technical authority across Nova-owned systems and the broader CIAS landscape.

About the Nova Team

The Nova team owns and supports a portfolio of foundational Sabre platform and infrastructure services, including:

• Off-Host Session Manager (OHSM)

• Cross Domain Session Store (CDSS) and related services (Sync, Garbage Collector)

• Customer Viewership (CVSP)

• Security Shared Cache

These platforms operate at Sabre scale, supporting thousands of transactions per second with low-latency response characteristics (10-100 milliseconds). As a result, Nova’s scope is focused on systems where stability, performance, security, and correctness are non-negotiable, and where outages, regressions, or audit gaps have immediate enterprise-level impact.

Over the past several years, Nova has consistently converted high-risk scope into stable, compliant, and cost-controlled outcomes, including:

• Leading production readiness with zero disruption for initial client traffic on critical platforms

• Stabilizing Router and OHSM into trusted CIAS infrastructure

• Establishing repeatable performance and testing practices

• Delivering PCI 4.0 audit outcomes, including late-scope SIM remediation

• Driving modernization through CI/CD improvements, repository migrations, and platform hardening (notably CVSP)

• Reducing infrastructure footprint across multiple systems, delivering ongoing run-rate cost avoidance

Collectively, these outcomes have avoided audit failures, protected platform-level SLAs, prevented incident-driven cost and escalation, and reduced long-term operational spend-while keeping CIAS’s most critical platforms performant and reliable at scale.

The Role

As a Principal Application Architect, you will define long-term architectural direction, guide engineering excellence through close partnership with the Nova team, and influence product and platform strategy across CIAS.

This is a hands-on architectural leadership role: deep in design, grounded in delivery, and accountable for non-functional outcomes at enterprise scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as an architectural authority for CIAS platforms supported by Nova, with accountability for stability, performance, security, and correctness

• Define and evolve the long-term architectural vision, strategy, and modernization roadmaps across Nova-owned systems

• Lead the design and evolution of large-scale, distributed, cloud-native platforms operating at Sabre scale

• Develop and maintain architectural blueprints, domain models, integration patterns, and target-state architectures

• Guide engineering teams through complex design decisions and trade-offs, balancing delivery realities with long-term platform health

• Partner with CIAS Product leadership, Engineering leaders, and CIAS Solutions Architects to ensure architecture aligns with CIAS architectural North Star vision, business strategy and performance requirements

• Drive architectural governance, ensuring consistency, security, compliance, and audit readiness across CIAS services

• Influence senior technical and business stakeholders across CIAS and Sabre to drive architectural alignment and strategic outcomes

• Conduct deep-dive design reviews and targeted code reviews for critical paths, high-risk changes, and production readiness

• Mentor senior engineers within Nova, raising the technical bar and strengthening architectural capability across the team

• Champion engineering excellence, cloud-first principles, and operational rigor

Qualifications & Experience

Required Experience

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, application architecture, or technical leadership roles

• Proven experience architecting and delivering large-scale, distributed, cloud-based systems

• Demonstrated ownership of non-functional requirements (performance, availability, security, resilience) for mission-critical platforms

• Deep expertise in application architecture, including microservices, domain-driven design, and API-first design

• Hands-on experience with cloud-native platforms (Kubernetes; public cloud such as GCP preferred)

• Experience defining architectural standards, guiding modernization, and influencing delivery across multiple teams

• Strong analytical and architectural modeling skills, with the ability to reason about complex systems at scale

• Excellent communication and influencing skills, including the ability to guide senior technical and business stakeholders

Technical Depth (Hands-On at the Architectural Level)

• Maintains architectural fluency through design reviews, critical code path reviews, and production readiness assessments

• Experience establishing or governing CI/CD standards, testing strategies, and quality gates for platform services

• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and secure delivery practices

• Working knowledge of Agile/Scrum development environments

• Ability to diagnose and reason about complex production issues when needed, without being a primary on-call implementer

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)

Benefits:

Paid time off

• Year-End-Break: enjoy additional fully paid days off during the last week of the year

• Paid parental leave: Take up to 12 weeks off with pay after birth or adoption of a child. Sabre Global Paid Parental Leave runs concurrently with local leave policies.

• Paid volunteer time: take up to 4 days annually to give your time to a charitable organization of your choice

Your money

• My Benefit platform/Multisport card: enjoy the benefit cafeteria system and use popular sport card

• Tax deduction: take the opportunity to claim deductible costs, reducing your income tax

• Employee Capital Plans: profit from long-term saving scheme co-financed by Sabre and the State Treasury

• Baby Bonus: benefit from one-time allowance on childbirth or adoption

• Say Thanks program: collect points on recognition program and transfer them to wide variety of gifts and services

Health and wellness

• Luxmed medical coverage: take care of yourself and your family with the extensive medical package with a broad range of additional services

• Foreign travel insurance: feel safe going abroad with free Allianz insurance offered as part of our Lux Med package

• Employee Assistance Program: find help in free, confidential program with a certified counselor

• Life insurance: sign up for free, high coverage life insurance program

Career development

• Professional development: enjoy access to Udemy learning platform as well as join Sabre live learning sessions

• Certification and tuition reimbursement

• Our Communities: join one of our team member groups focused on sharing knowledge and best practices (Google Developers Group, Innovation Lab Community, Women in Technology, SOLVE!T and many more)

And more

• Car and bike parking

• Fun & Relax zone in modern office: enjoy electronic tables to work, foosball, ping pong, pool table, swings, massage chairs and terraces to admire a panoramic view of Kraków. We have parents’ rooms as well

• No dress code

• Innovation Lab: access Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality equipment, Robot construction kit, 3D printers and many more

• Attractive Referral Bonus: earn $2500 USD for every hired referral

We will give careful consideration to your application and review your details against the position criteria. You will receive separate notification as we progress your application.

Please note that only candidates who meet the minimum requirements will proceed in the selection process.

Sabre is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

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