Principal architect (Xico)

we are seeking a highly skilled and visionary principal architect to lead the design and evolution of our enterprise integration ecosystem. This role will be responsible for defining architecture standards, guiding engineering teams, and driving modernization initiatives across apis, integrations, event-driven systems, cloud-native applications, and ai-enabled solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture Leadership & Strategy
  • develop technology roadmaps aligned with business strategy and organizational goals
  • lead architecture reviews and provide technical guidance across multiple engineering teams
  • evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption strategies
  • define and maintain enterprise architecture standards, principles, and best practices
  • establish reference architectures, reusable frameworks, and architectural governance processes
• API & Integration Architecture
  • design scalable, secure, and highly available api ecosystems
  • establish standards for api design, versioning, documentation, security, observability, and lifecycle management
  • lead integration strategies across internal applications, saas platforms, partners, and enterprise systems
  • drive api governance initiatives, api catalog management, and service reuse
  • design patterns for synchronous and asynchronous integrations
• Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
  • lead domain discovery and event storming workshops with business and technical stakeholders
  • define bounded contexts, aggregates, domain services, and domain events
  • promote business-aligned architectures through ubiquitous language and domain ownership
  • guide teams in decomposing monolithic systems into domain-centric services and capabilities
• Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
  • design and implement event-driven and message-based architectures
  • define standards for event modeling, event contracts, schema governance, and event versioning
  • establish best practices for resiliency, retries, dead-letter processing, idempotency, and fault tolerance
  • drive adoption of event streaming and asynchronous communication patterns
• AI & Intelligent Engineering
  • lead the adoption of ai-powered engineering practices across software delivery teams
  • identify opportunities where ai can improve business processes, customer experiences, and operational efficiency
  • define governance, security, compliance, and responsible ai practices
  • champion ai-assisted development practices, including code generation, automated testing, intelligent code reviews, and developer productivity tools
  • mentor teams on effectively leveraging ai while maintaining engineering quality and security standards
• Engineering Excellence
  • champion test-driven development (tdd), behavior-driven development (bdd), and automated quality practices
  • promote clean architecture, solid principles, and maintainable software design
  • define standards for unit, integration, contract, performance, and security testing
  • lead modernization initiatives and technical debt reduction efforts
  • mentor architects, engineers, and technical leads
• Cloud & Platform Architecture
  • design cloud-native solutions leveraging azure and modern platform services
  • define strategies for scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, and operational excellence
  • partner with platform teams to improve ci/cd pipelines, developer experience, observability, and deployment automation
  • drive adoption of infrastructure as code (iac) and platform engineering practices

Required Qualifications

• bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years in an architecture, principal engineer, or technical leadership role
• proven experience designing enterprise-scale integration and distributed systems
• deep expertise in
  • api architecture and enterprise integrations
  • domain-driven design (ddd)
  • event-driven architecture (eda)
  • test-driven development (tdd)
  • microservices and distributed systems
  • cloud-native architecture
  • software design patterns and architecture principles
• strong understanding of rest apis, openapi specifications, oauth2, oidc, api security, and identity management
• experience with enterprise messaging technologies such as kafka, azure service bus, event hubs, rabbitmq, or similar platforms
• experience implementing observability practices including distributed tracing, monitoring, logging, and telemetry
• experience integrating ai capabilities into enterprise applications or software delivery processes
• strong communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications

• experience with microsoft azure, including:
  • azure api management (apim)
  • azure functions
  • azure service bus
  • event hubs
  • azure kubernetes service (aks)
  • azure sql / managed instance
  • application insights
  • azure ai services
• experience with .net and c# development
• experience implementing api governance programs and enterprise api catalogs
• knowledge of cqrs, event sourcing, saga patterns, and distributed transaction management
• experience with opentelemetry and enterprise observability platforms
• experience with:
  • large language models (llms)
  • retrieval-augmented generation (rag)
  • ai agents
  • prompt engineering
  • vector databases and semantic search
• azure, cloud, or architecture certifications preferred

Leadership Expectations

• influence architecture decisions across multiple teams and business units
• build strong partnerships with product, engineering, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders
• mentor engineers and architects while fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous learning
• drive technical excellence and establish engineering standards that scale across the organization
• serve as a trusted advisor for strategic technology investments and modernization initiatives

Success Metrics

• within the first 12 months, improve api discoverability, governance, consistency, and adoption across the enterprise
• establish and institutionalize architecture standards for apis, integrations, ai solutions, and event-driven systems
• increase engineering productivity through ai-assisted development practices
• reduce integration complexity through reusable services and architectural patterns
• improve system reliability, scalability, and observability
• deliver measurable business value through ai-enabled solutions and modern integration architectures
• elevate the architectural maturity and technical capabilities of engineering teams