Sr Principal Architect, Foundational Platforms (Sterling)

Sr Principal Architect, Foundational Platforms

Location: Nashville, TN or Sterling, VA or San Mateo, CA

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Sr Principal Architect leads enterprise architecture for the foundational platforms, standards, and practices used to build, deliver, secure, and operate software. This role sets technical direction across the software development lifecycle, developer platforms and tooling, observability and logging, reliability, and identity and authentication. Responsibilities include defining reference architectures and standards, guiding strategic technology decisions, mentoring teams, and partnering across Engineering, Security, Cloud, and Operations to improve developer productivity, security, reliability, and operational excellence.

ESSENTIAL JOB SKILLS/DUTIES

• Define enterprise architecture and reference patterns for software delivery and engineering platforms.
• Establish standards for SDLC, developer tooling, observability, logging, reliability, and authentication.
• Lead architecture reviews and cross-domain technical decisions.
• Shape developer platform, self-service, automation, and developer experience strategy.
• Partner with Security on identity, service-to-service authentication, software supply chain, and platform security.
• Guide modernization and adoption of common foundational platform capabilities and standards.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers and partner with technology leaders on strategy.

REQUIRED TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Software Delivery: Aligns SDLC, CI/CD, testing, release, and software supply-chain standards across domains.
• Developer Platforms: Aligns developer tooling, self-service, service catalog, and platform engineering standards across domains.
• Observability & Logging: Aligns metrics, logs, traces, telemetry, and monitoring standards across domains.
• Reliability Engineering: Aligns SLO, resilience, performance, capacity, and operational readiness practices across domains.
• Identity & Authentication: Aligns principal and service authentication standards, including OAuth/OIDC, workload identity, mTLS, and Zero Trust patterns.
• Security Engineering: Aligns security architecture and automated controls with enterprise engineering practices.
• Cloud & Distributed Systems: Aligns architecture standards for scalable cloud platforms and distributed applications.

REQUIRED LEADERSHIP SKILLS

• Strategic thinking with long-term perspective.
• Influence without authority across functions.
• Clear communication to technical and executive audiences.
• Pragmatic decision-making across complex trade-offs.
• Drive standards, alignment, and continuous improvement.

REQUIRED EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of professional technology experience.
• Experience defining architecture for enterprise-scale platforms or distributed systems.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives and establishing enterprise standards.

PREFERRED EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE

• Experience with enterprise developer platforms, SDLC modernization, or platform engineering.
• Experience with enterprise observability, reliability, identity, or security architecture.
• Experience in large-scale, regulated, or security-sensitive environments.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provides technical leadership to engineering and architecture teams.
• Guides senior engineers and principal contributors.

TRAVEL REQUIREMENTS

• Travels: As needed for leadership and collaboration.
• % of Time: Up to 10% annually.
• Overnight Travel: Occasional for key initiatives.