Principal IT Architect: Lead Enterprise Scale & GenAI

Job Overview & Responsibilities

• The Principal Architect will be responsible for leading the architectural design and strategy for Baggage Scanning suite applications. The role will lead the design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance.
• Work with other architects across the organization and at the enterprise level to build resilient and performant applications which can handle multiple business capabilities and deliver value. Guide the team on best practices in building large scale systems.
• The Principal Application Architect is highly experienced, self-sufficient, requires no direct supervision, and mentors/coach's others.
• Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leaders to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, opinion papers, and architecture decision frameworks that guide the design of technology solutions, especially those requiring integration of applications.
• Develop and manage a technical strategy and coordinates adoption. This role will be responsible to guide architects and convey best practices/common pitfalls for system design, infrastructure integrations, application development practices, and application runtime principles.
• Manage the architecture review process by creating validation checklists, reviewing architectural artifacts, and providing domain specific guidance to drive architectural alignment across the enterprise.
• Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines and observability tools (Harness, Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk) to ensure efficient software delivery and application reliability.
• Conduct research and develop Proof of Concepts on emerging technologies and implementation toolkits in support of anticipated development efforts and recommend technologies that are functionally robust and cost effective.
• Architect solutions leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Artificial Intelligence (AI) Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, agentic workflows, AI integrated development platforms, and custom‑built technology products.
• Research, enforce, and drive the adoption of design patterns throughout the enterprise and promotes best practices for solution design and development.
• Identify new technologies, industry trends, and best practices, which should be incorporated into BFS policies & roadmap.
• Be a Thought Partner, establishing themselves as the Subject matter expert with Product Owners, Applications Developers, Architects, Analysts, Business Process owners.
• Leading and influencing the design, testing, evaluation, implementation, and support for technologies & R&D POCsofvarious size and complexity (application services, software, and systems tools).
• Hands‑on development, support and troubleshoot of software systems as required, optimizing performance, resolving problems, and providing follow‑up on all issues and solutions.
• Ability to lead diagnostics/troubleshooting with the production support team during outages/incidents (including outside of business hours as needed).
• Work closely to define the product technical roadmap, prioritization and effort estimation with the product owners, business and platform architects.
• Architects complex release patterns, code review/branching strategies, and/or documentation of various levels of architecture; context diagram, component diagram, deployment diagram, sequence diagram, and logical architecture.
• Support pilots for emerging technologies (including AWS services and CoPilot) and guide their transition into scalable, supported production environments.
• Develops documentation to support the application and as a guide for establishing common practices across the platform.
• Partners with platform engineering and DevOps teams to research, design and implement the appropriate technology needed to support the automation and orchestration strategy.
• Partnership with the Enterprise architecture, network, and security engineering team is critical to ensure that the architectural principals support the requirements and needs of the application as well as enterprise.
• Communicates regularly and effectively with senior technology leadership.
• Coordinate effort with external stakeholders to ensure timely delivery of dependent components.
• Working knowledge of service‑level agreements (SLAs), escalation paths, managed services workflows, and ticketing platforms such as ServiceNow and Jira.
• Ensures solutions are clearly communicated for implementation, deliverables are of acceptable quality.
• Ensures compliance of architectural and engineering policies, standards and procedures.
• Monitor and stay abreast of industry trends and anticipate future direction of application development and cloud computing.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, with a strong background in managing complex enterprise applications and infrastructure.
• 3+ years of AWS experience.
• 2+ years of Android Mobile Solution Experience.
• Experience with usage of cloud platform like AWS, GCP and serverless technologies, services and container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes etc.) or similar.
• Full-stack application management in AWS cloud native technologies like such as EC2, S3, RDS, EKS, Lambda, AmazonMQ, API Gateway, DynamoDB etc., and high level network and hardware integration.
• Experience implementing /deploying microservices, web services and APIs, gateways, service mesh in highly automated CI/CD environments.
• Experience in Well-Architected frameworks, application performance tuning, application resilience and reliability improvement.
• Experience in developing large scale responsive web applications across multiple end user devices.
• Experience in troubleshooting and support during critical system outages for operationally critical applications.
• Familiarity with GenAI, agentic technologies, automation platforms, and AI tools.
• Coordinating efforts across multiple teams like Release Managers, DevOps Engineers, QA, UX designers for a successful delivery of applications.
• DevOps and CI/CD: Strong knowledge of DevOps practices, including CI/CD, automation, and observability tools (Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk).
• Security and Vulnerability Management: Solid understanding of security best practices, including vulnerability management and mitigation.
• Data Management: Proficient in data architecture, governance, and security, with experience in both relational and non-relational databases.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship.
• Successful completion of interview required to meet job qualification.
• Reliable, punctual attendance is an essential function of the position.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science.
• Airline Experience.

The base pay range for this role is $140,600.00 to $183,108.00.

You may be eligible for the following competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, life, accident & disability, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k) and flight privileges.

United Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected category under applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. To request an accommodation, contact View email address on click.appcast.io.