Principal Software Architect
First seen by Alion on Oct 30, 2026.
About the role
We are looking for a technically strong software engineering leader to own software quality, architecture and integrated delivery across our India software organisation. Our robots depend on multiple software disciplines working together reliably. You will help shape technology strategy and organisational direction, and translate that into sound architectural decisions, strong engineering practices and dependable execution. This is a hands-on leadership role combining technical depth, people management and accountability for outcomes.
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, Reports to: Chief Technology Officer · Experience: 10+ years
About Us
We are building robots to maintain, organise and reset common public and commercial spaces — offices, campuses, venues and other high-traffic facilities. We are building a hybrid end-to-end architecture where classical and modern methods work together for maximum reliability and robustness, with R&D in Bengaluru and Wellington, New Zealand.
What you will do
Technology direction and architecture: help shape technology strategy and drive architecture decisions across robot software, cloud services, data processing and model training infrastructure. Own system-level requirements — latency, compute and memory budgets, end-to-end reliability. Establish clear interfaces and component ownership, and resolve technical trade-offs across the stack.
Software quality, security and engineering practices: set and embed standards for code quality, testing, documentation, observability and secure development. Own the software security review and audit process across robot and cloud systems, working with specialists where needed. Build quality into everyday development through effective reviews, automated validation and measurable acceptance criteria.
Integrated software delivery: own delivery across teams, turning product priorities into realistic plans with clear commitments, dependencies and milestones. Resolve execution bottlenecks and hold teams accountable for working software and demonstrated robot behaviour.
Integration, resilience and release readiness: own integration and release readiness across robot software, cloud services, and data and training pipelines, including Kubernetes. Define and validate behaviour during connectivity loss, service degradation and component failures, including safe fallback, recovery and rollback. Establish reproducible builds and simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, on-robot and cloud testing.
Hands-on technical leadership: stay close to implementation through critical design and code work, complex debugging and direct involvement in the most consequential technical problems.
People and team development: lead and develop engineers and technical leads; build capability through hiring, coaching, clear performance expectations and stronger technical ownership.
Cross-team alignment: bring teams together around shared technical decisions and delivery outcomes, including teams outside your reporting line.
Experience
- At least 10 years in robotics or AI, including technical leadership roles
- Strong understanding of autonomy systems such as VLA/VLM models, SLAM, planning, perception and ML-based decision-making
- Python, C++, ROS, and ML stacks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Experience with robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems or comparable products where software interacts with physical hardware
- Practical experience improving automated testing, continuous integration, release processes and production reliability
- Evidence of delivering programmes spanning multiple teams, including teams outside your reporting line
- Experience architecting and operating cloud platforms, containerised workloads, and large-scale data processing or model training pipelines
What success looks like
- Teams deliver predictably against a shared plan, with clear ownership and fewer late integration surprises
- Architecture supports product goals and makes the software easier to extend, test and maintain
- Releases produce measurable improvements in robot behaviour and reliability
- Recurring failures, escaped defects and avoidable engineering rework decrease
- Engineers and technical leads grow in capability, ownership and execution independence
Skills
Robotics, Software architecture, Autonomy systems, ROS, C++, Python, Kubernetes, Cloud platforms, CI/CD, Software security, Engineering leadership, Hardware-in-the-loop testing