Principal Software Architect

Job Summary: As the Principal Software Architect for the Retail Vertical, you will serve as the main technical authority across our entire portfolio of retail software solutions reporting to the VP of Software Engineering. You will partner directly with executive leadership to shape the technical vision that drives our business growth, ensuring our architecture is not only scalable but also financially efficient and commercially viable.

This role requires a rare blend of deep technical expertise, and financial acumen. You will be responsible for defining the architectural roadmap for the entire vertical, optimizing cloud spend, engaging with key enterprise clients, and leading a transformative rollout of AI-driven engineering tools such as Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc to revolutionize our development velocity and quality.

Primary Responsibilities:

Vertical-Wide Technical Governance (Strategic Scope):

• Architectural Authority: Act as the primary decision-maker for all major architectural choices across the Retail Vertical, ensuring alignment between diverse product lines and the overarching business strategy.
• Scalable Strategy: Design and enforce a unified architectural vision that prioritizes scalability and maintainability across a multi-product portfolio, preventing technical debt before it starts.
• Executive Partnership: Collaborate with technical leads to translate high-level business goals into a technical roadmap that delivers measurable ROI.

AI Innovation & Engineering Efficiency:

• AI Tooling Strategy: Lead the evaluation, implementation, and validation of AI-assisted development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, and others—to modernize the engineering workflow.
• Automated Quality: Drive the adoption of these AI tools to automate complex tasks such as peer reviews, unit test generation, UI test generation, and bug fixing, establishing a new standard for code quality and developer velocity.

Client & Commercial Advisory:

• Technical Evangelism: Serve as the technical face of the Retail Vertical for key enterprise accounts and partners, articulating our security, scalability, and AI capabilities to help close high-value deals.
• Trust & Security: Provide architectural assurance to stakeholders regarding data privacy and security, turning our technical infrastructure into a competitive sales advantage.

Mentorship, Coding & Leadership:

• Hands-on Leadership: Despite the strategic scope, remain hands-on in the codebase to set the gold standard for quality, resolve critical architectural bottlenecks, and mentor/Level up senior engineers, and BU Leaders.
• Culture of Excellence: Foster a culture of innovation by leading technical reviews and mentoring the engineering team on advanced design patterns and the effective use of AI assistants.

Primary Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in a lead role managing complex, multi-product portfolios.
• Strategic Authority: Proven track record of making high-stakes technical decisions that span multiple product lines or business units.
• Commercial Acumen: Experience interacting with external clients or executive stakeholders, with the ability to explain technical value in business terms.
• AI & Tooling Proficiency: Practical experience with modern AI coding assistants and a vision for how to integrate them into CI/CD and QA workflows.
• Technical Stack: Deep expertise in Microsoft .NET, React, JavaScript, and microservices architectures.
• Retail/SaaS Focus: Prior experience in Retail Technology or high-volume SaaS is strongly preferred.