Principal Architect-Network

Reltio

2d•Remote

About The Position

Reltio is scaling a cloud-native, multi-tenant data platform used by global enterprises. We need a Principal Architect to set the end-to-end architecture vision, de-risk the roadmap, and turn strategy into secure, reliable, cost-efficient systems—while upleveling the engineering organization. Enterprise & Product Architecture: Define the north-star architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS data platform (ingest → processing → storage → query → API/SDK/UX). Establish reference architectures, decision records, and standards. Cloud-Native Platform: Drive container orchestration, service mesh, control planes, observability, and resilience across AWS/Azure/GCP. Data & Streaming: Lead designs for high-volume streaming, low-latency query, and analytical/ML use cases (batch + real-time). AI/ML & Agentic AI: Partner with product and security to embed responsible LLM/agentic patterns (guardrails, retrieval, evals) into customer-facing and internal developer workflows. Reliability, Security & Compliance: Champion SRE/SOC2/ISO/GDPR-by-design, error budgets, threat modeling, and secure SDLC. Developer Experience: Improve CI/CD, test strategy, paved roads, and golden paths; reduce cognitive load and toil across teams. Executive & Customer Influence: Translate architecture trade-offs for executives and key customers; guide buy-build-integrate decisions.

Requirements

20+ years in product/platform architecture for large-scale, cloud-native SaaS; recent Principal/Distinguished Architect scope leading end-to-end product decisions and migrations across multi-cloud.
Cloud & Kubernetes depth: EKS/AKS/GKE; service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), observability (Prometheus/Grafana), platform control planes, operators/CRDs. Able to define golden paths/paved roads for teams.
Data platform & streaming expertise: Kafka/Flink/Spark; columnar/OLAP (Druid, ClickHouse), NoSQL (Cassandra), search (Elasticsearch/Opensearch); real-time + batch patterns.
Microservices & integration at enterprise scale: API gateways, event-driven design, SOA/EAI (Apache Camel/Mule/WSO2/JBoss Fuse).
AI/ML & Agentic AI in production: ML pipelines (MLflow/Kubeflow/Airflow) and LLM/agent frameworks (OpenAI APIs, LLaMA, LangChain/LangGraph; tool-use, memory, evals).
Security, privacy, and compliance by design: threat modeling, data classification, encryption/keys, and EU GDPR awareness through real product work.
Executive communication & customer leadership: converts complex trade-offs into simple choices; partners with CXO/stakeholders globally; architecture evangelism with customers.
C-suite influence & decision facilitation: runs architecture reviews/SteerCos with crisp options, risk/ROI framing, and written decision records; pre-wires global stakeholders to land decisions quickly.
Customer-back product thinking: meets enterprises regularly, translates requirements into phased designs (MVP → scale), and defends non-negotiables (SLOs, security, privacy).
Cross-geo orchestration: proven delivery across US/EU/India time zones; builds async rituals, documentation standards, and handoff mechanisms that raise velocity and quality.
Culture carrier & coaching: uplevels Staff/Principal engineers, codifies paved roads (CI/CD, testing, observability), and scales architectural patterns via ADRs/radars.

Nice To Haves

Multi-cloud platform stewardship: proven ownership of cross-cloud platforms (e.g., control planes, observability, incident management) and data lake stacks, shipped to enterprise customers.
Cost/performance engineering: track record reducing infra cost per tenant and improving p95/p99 latency/MTTR via capacity planning, workload placement, and autoscaling patterns.
Programming fluency: Java/Scala/Python/Go/Rust for credible code-review and reference implementations.
OSS & ecosystem contribution: prior contributions to relevant frameworks (e.g., Hadoop tuning, NoSQL ORM, Camel/Keycloak) a plus.

Responsibilities

Set the vision: Author and socialize the product/platform architecture strategy; maintain ADRs and tech radars.
Design at scale: Lead designs for multi-tenant isolation, data models, schemas, indexing/OLAP, and event-driven systems.
Evolve the platform: Standardize service meshes, API gateways, policy-as-code, and multi-cloud deployment patterns.
Operational excellence: Embed SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident learning), capacity planning, and chaos testing.
Security & privacy: Lead threat models, data classification, encryption, secrets, key management, and SBOM/SLSA controls.
AI architecture: Define patterns for RAG/agents, prompt & model governance, telemetry, evaluations, and fallbacks.
Mentor & scale: Coach Staff/Principal engineers and architects; chair architecture reviews; build a healthy review culture.
Executive partnering: Communicate options/trade-offs to C-suite; align decisions with business value and customer impact.
Customer evangelism: Join key enterprise conversations; convert requirements into pragmatic designs and phased delivery.