Application Architecture, Principal
Blue Shield of California10 days ago
Oakland, CA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Define application architecture direction for major platform capabilities, reusable services, and cross-domain technical initiatives.
- Lead decisions involving service decomposition, API ecosystems, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, marketplace enablement, and shared platform capabilities.
- Partner with engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and business stakeholders to align architecture with platform strategy.
- Drive build-versus-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions.
- Review designs and code, evaluate pull requests when needed, reason through incidents, and guide concrete technical decisions.
- Establish architecture standards and review practices covering design quality, production readiness, security, observability, and operational ownership.
- Resolve high-impact technical risks, cross-team dependencies, design conflicts, and complex platform tradeoffs.
- Create reusable architecture frameworks, decision models, reference patterns, AI-enabled guidance, decision records, diagrams, API standards, service templates, and architecture review notes.
- Establish patterns for customer-isolated data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, pharma workflows, partner integrations, and marketplace enablement.
- Mentor senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree or high-school diploma/GED plus four additional years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
- 10+ years of software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical experience.
- Experience leading application architecture for distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices, internal platforms, or modernization initiatives.
- Strong hands-on engineering experience with service design, API contracts, code structure, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production tradeoffs.
- Deep experience with domain-driven design, service decomposition, integration architecture, shared services, customer extensions, and reusable platform patterns.
- Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment.
- Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant/customer isolation, and auditability.
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate platform strategy into architecture direction and execution standards.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
- Healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated-industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platform experience is strongly preferred.
- Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
- Enterprise architecture experience paired with hands-on application architecture and delivery execution is a plus.
- Excellent written communication.
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