Principal Architect

Cox Automotive's architecture group is reimagining the car-buying and service experience from inventory management, consumer shopping, service, and deal inception to close. The CAI Architecture Team architects and evolves the platforms that power inventory management, deal creation, validation, and service across the retail lifecycle.

The Principal Solution Architect provides technical leadership for key Cox Automotive products, advancing platform modernization, solution architecture, and AI initiatives across CAI services.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive solution design from discovery through delivery - shaping epics, validating assumptions, surfacing risks early, and aligning across teams to target architecture
• Partner with engineering, product, and agile leaders to sequence and prioritize architectural investments, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health
• Champion adoption of Cox Automotive's Common tenancy and user management platforms and AWS-native patterns within the value stream
• Identify, evaluate, and champion generative AI capabilities for new products and features, aligning implementations with Retail Agentic Platform standards and establishing reusable architecture practices.
• Produce and maintain architectural artifacts - roadmaps, decision records, solution diagrams, integration models - that give teams clear, actionable direction
• Assess emerging AI technologies and coordinate with governance partners to ensure ethical, regulatory, security, and enterprise standards are addressed.
• Promote reusable patterns and frameworks to accelerate Product development and AI adoption.
• Translate business objectives and constraints into practical solution options, trade-offs, and technical recommendations for delivery teams.
• Build engineering teams' AI capabilities through hands-on mentoring, design reviews, and guidance on applying approved patterns.
• Lead proofs of concept and reference implementations that validate architectural assumptions, reduce delivery risk, and establish reusable implementation patterns.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 10 years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and 6 years' experience; a Ph.D. and 3 years' experience; or 20 years' experience in a related field.
• Proven ability to align diverse stakeholders around technical direction, navigate ambiguity, and drive consensus across engineering, product, and business teams.
• Highly analytical and capable of diving technically deep to rapidly deliver proof-of-concepts and perform experimentation.
• Breadth of architectural knowledge spanning application, integration, and platform domains, with the ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Extensive technical experience in application architecture and API delivery at scale.
• Experience developing APIs at scale using GraphQL and/or REST.
• Experience in full development life cycle with significant experience delivering applications and architecture services in a production environment.
• Strong familiarity with architecting for and delivering solutions in a public cloud environment (AWS preferred).
• Hands-on experience with AI technologies and concepts (LLMs, autonomous agents, vector databases, model selection, agent-based architecture, data pipeline, AI-assisted PDLC, etc.)
• Experience working within DevOps cultures, with a focus on process improvement, automation, and continuous delivery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven ability to identify and select appropriate application and data systems for varied workloads - integrations, processing, APIs, and operational reporting.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and async messaging patterns at consumer scale.
• Experience with API governance, API contract management, and establishing standards across engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive platform thinking - identifying reuse opportunities, reducing duplication, and shaping shared capabilities across delivery streams.
• Track record of enabling teams through influence without authority - mentoring engineers, shaping technical direction, and elevating architectural maturity across an organization.