Application Architecture, Sr. Principal
Blue Shield of California13 days ago
Oakland, CA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Set technical architecture vision for enterprise-scale application platforms serving multiple customers, vendors, product lines, and workflows.
- Define reusable patterns for domain-owned services, APIs, event-driven workflows, marketplace capabilities, customer isolation, and vendor integrations.
- Lead build-versus-buy, platform consolidation, modernization, and integration strategy decisions.
- Translate platform strategy into practical architecture patterns that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, operate, and evolve.
- Review designs and code, evaluate pull requests, reason through production incidents, and guide concrete technical decisions.
- Align engineering and product leaders on architecture priorities, risks, standards, tradeoffs, and investments.
- Establish governance and decision frameworks that improve reuse, resiliency, security, interoperability, observability, and production outcomes.
- Advance AI-assisted development practices, architecture documentation, service templates, reusable engineering guidance, and developer tooling patterns.
- Mentor principal engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders.
- Document architecture decisions through decision records, reference diagrams, API standards, service templates, AI skills, and architecture review notes.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree, or a high school diploma/GED plus four additional years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
- At least 12 years of experience in software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical work.
- Extensive experience setting application architecture direction for enterprise-scale distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, internal platforms, marketplace platforms, or large-scale modernization.
- Expert knowledge of microservices, API ecosystems, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, integration strategy, and platform services.
- Strong hands-on engineering background, including code structure, service design, API contracts, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production failure modes.
- Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment.
- Strong understanding of TypeScript, Node.js, APIs, React-based application platforms, containerized workloads, Kubernetes, and infrastructure automation.
- Experience with service decomposition, integration architecture, and tradeoffs among shared services, product services, and customer-specific extensions.
- Experience with build-versus-buy decisions, vendor integration, platform consolidation, marketplace capabilities, or reusable platform services.
- Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, event contracts, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant isolation, and auditability.
- Ability to lead complex technical decisions across engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and executive stakeholders without formal management authority.
- Ability to create architecture standards, decision frameworks, and reusable patterns that influence engineering execution.
- Experience mentoring staff- and principal-level engineers and architects.
- Excellent written communication and ability to make architecture decisions clear, concise, and actionable.
- Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
- Experience with healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated-industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platforms is strongly preferred.
- Enterprise architecture experience is a plus when paired with hands-on application architecture and delivery experience.
- Experience designing enterprise marketplace platforms, multi-tenant systems, customer-isolated data boundaries, partner integrations, or regulated healthcare and pharma capabilities is valued.
Benefits
- Hybrid workplace model with purposeful in-person collaboration and flexibility, generally requiring two office days per week for most teams.
- Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will determine in-office time with their manager based on business need.
Tech Stack
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