Principal Software Architect

Principal Solution ArchitectJoin AT&T and help shape the communications and technology platforms that connect customers, employees, and business capabilities at scale. The Technology Services organization advances information technology performance by delivering secure, reliable, and efficient solutions that improve business outcomes and end user experience. In this role, you will translate business strategy into practical, scalable, and operable technology designs while partnering across product, engineering, security, infrastructure, operations, and executive stakeholders. When you step into a career with AT&T, you will not just imagine the future, you will help create it.As a Principal Solution Architect, you will serve as a senior technical authority responsible for defining solution architecture, design standards, integration patterns, and technology direction for complex enterprise platforms. You will connect business needs to secure, scalable, resilient, and maintainable technology solutions while guiding teams through delivery, governance, and operational readiness.Key responsibilities include:Convert business objectives, customer experience needs, operational constraints, and compliance requirements into clear solution architecture decisions.Lead end-to-end architecture across applications, APIs, data, cloud platforms, integrations, security, observability, and operations.Develop reusable reference architectures, integration patterns, design standards, architecture decision records, and roadmaps that improve consistency across teams.Architect secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective enterprise solutions that support mission-critical applications and business capabilities.Guide API strategy, service boundaries, event-driven patterns, data flows, system interactions, and platform integration across complex ecosystems.Partner with product, engineering, infrastructure, operations, cybersecurity, vendors, and business stakeholders to align technology decisions with enterprise priorities.Provide architecture governance through design reviews, risk assessments, tradeoff analysis, technology selection, and delivery checkpoints.Drive operational excellence by embedding availability, reliability, performance, disaster recovery, monitoring, incident readiness, and supportability into designs.Evaluate emerging technologies, modernization opportunities, automation capabilities, and technical debt reduction strategies with a practical business lens.Mentor architects and engineers, influence technical direction without relying on formal authority, and build shared confidence around complex architecture decisions.Core skills this role is expected to demonstrate:Business acumen: Connect architecture choices to revenue, cost, customer experience, delivery risk, and operational outcomes.Systems thinking: Understand upstream and downstream impacts across applications, data, APIs, infrastructure, security, and operations.Technical foundation: Guide engineering decisions across modern application, cloud, integration, data, automation, and platform technologies.Architecture and design: Apply architecture patterns, design principles, service boundaries, domain modeling, and fit-for-purpose technology choices.Communication: Explain complex designs clearly to executives, business partners, engineers, vendors, and support teams.Leadership without authority: Influence decisions, resolve disagreement, create alignment, and move cross-functional teams toward execution.Integration expertise: Design REST APIs, event flows, messaging, identity integration, SaaS connectivity, and enterprise interoperability patterns.Security mindset: Build authentication, authorization, privacy, auditability, compliance, and secure-by-design principles into architecture.Operational excellence: Plan for resilience, observability, performance, supportability, incident response, capacity, and disaster recovery.Decision making under uncertainty: Make practical tradeoffs across scope, cost, risk, time, technical debt, future flexibility, and business value.What You'll Need:7+ years of experience designing, architecting, and delivering large-scale enterprise technology solutions.Strong hands-on background in software engineering, enterprise applications, APIs, cloud platforms, integration patterns, and modern delivery practices.Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements, strategic priorities, and operational constraints into solution architecture and execution guidance.Experience defining target-state architectures, transition roadmaps, reference patterns, sequence flows, deployment views, data flows, and architecture decision records.Strong understanding of security architecture, identity, access management, data protection, resilience, regulatory considerations, and auditability.Experience with highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, observable, and supportable systems in mission-critical environments.Ability to lead architecture reviews, challenge assumptions, evaluate design tradeoffs, and guide teams through complex technical decisions.Proven ability to work across business, product, engineering, operations, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and vendor stakeholders.Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and executive communication skills with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts.Strong leadership presence, mentoring capability, and ability to influence outcomes without direct authority.Preferred Qualifications:Experience architecting enterprise platforms in Fortune 500 or similarly large, complex environments.Experience with cloud-native architecture, hybrid cloud platforms, microservices, API management, event-driven architecture, and platform modernization.Knowledge of architecture governance methods such as reference architectures, architecture review boards, reusable standards, and architecture decision records.Experience with observability, DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, resiliency engineering, and production support models.Industry certifications or formal training in cloud architecture, enterprise architecture, security architecture, or related technology disciplines.Success in this role looks like practical architecture that teams can execute, business partners can understand, and operations teams can support with confidence.