Principal Architect
Cox AutomotiveResponsibilities
- Drive solution design from discovery through delivery, including shaping epics, validating assumptions, identifying risks, and aligning teams to target architecture.
- Partner with engineering, product, and agile leaders to prioritize architectural investments and balance delivery needs with long-term platform health.
- Promote Cox Automotive’s Common tenancy and user management platforms and AWS-native patterns.
- Identify, evaluate, and champion generative AI capabilities and establish reusable architecture practices.
- Create and maintain architectural roadmaps, decision records, solution diagrams, and integration models.
- Assess emerging AI technologies and coordinate with governance partners on ethical, regulatory, security, and enterprise standards.
- Develop reusable patterns and frameworks to accelerate product development and AI adoption.
- Translate business objectives into solution options, trade-offs, and technical recommendations.
- Mentor engineering teams through hands-on guidance, design reviews, and approved AI patterns.
- Lead proofs of concept and reference implementations to validate architecture and reduce delivery risk.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 10 years of related experience, or alternative combinations including a master’s degree with 6 years, a Ph.D. with 3 years, or 20 years of related experience.
- Experience aligning diverse stakeholders, navigating ambiguity, driving consensus, and influencing without authority.
- Strong analytical ability and capacity to work deeply on technical proofs of concept and experimentation.
- Broad architecture knowledge across application, integration, and platform domains.
- Extensive experience with application architecture and API delivery at scale.
- Experience developing APIs at scale using GraphQL and/or REST.
- Significant production experience across the full development lifecycle delivering applications and architecture services.
- Experience architecting and delivering solutions in public cloud environments, preferably AWS.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, autonomous agents, vector databases, model selection, agent-based architecture, data pipelines, and AI-assisted product development lifecycles.
- Experience in DevOps-oriented cultures with process improvement, automation, and continuous delivery.
- Understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, API governance, API contract management, and platform thinking.
About Cox Automotive
Cox Automotive is the world’s largest automotive services and technology provider. Fueled by the largest breadth of first- and third-party data fed by 2.3 billion online interactions a year, Cox Automotive tailors leading solutions for car shoppers, auto manufacturers, dealers, lenders and fleets. The company has 29,000+ employees on four continents and a portfolio of industry-leading brands that include Autotrader®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, vAuto®, Dealertrack®, NextGear Capital™, CentralDispatch® and Cox Fleet®. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately owned, Atlanta-based company with $23 billion in annual revenue. Cox Automotive has been included on Glassdoor’s Best Companies in Tech & AI 2026 and Best Place to Work in 2026 lists.