Principal Architect, Platform Architecture

McKesson•Columbus, OH

12h

About The Position

McKesson's Platform Architecture team shapes the engineering platform that serves every engineering team at McKesson, while simultaneously embedding in the organization’s highest-priority, most technically complex initiatives to ensure those projects build on the platform as intended and to bring what they surface back as first-class platform capabilities. The Principal Architect is the most senior individual contributor on this team, and that dual mandate is the core of the role. This is a role for an architect who earns organizational influence through the quality of their thinking and the credibility of their recommendations. You will own architectural direction for key platform domains, develop and ratify organizational standards through the McKesson Architecture Review Board, and serve as the embedded architectural partner on high-profile initiatives across value stream engineering. When your embedded work reveals a gap between what the platform offers and what teams need, you don’t hand it off — you translate it into a platform capability and drive it through. This is not a review role that appears late and comments on completed designs. The value is being present early, trusted deeply, and able to change outcomes — on individual projects and on the platform that underlies all of them. This role reports to the Sr. Director of Platform Architecture.

Requirements

13+ years of software and platform engineering experience, with at least 8 years in senior individual contributor roles where architectural responsibility spanned multiple systems or teams.
Retains meaningful technical depth — able to prototype in critical platform areas, conduct rigorous code and architecture reviews, and go deep on technical problems when the team needs it.
Demonstrated ability to set and steward architectural direction for complex, cloud-native platforms — with evidence that standards and decisions reduced rather than created technical debt over time.
Deep expertise in at least two platform domains: cloud infrastructure architecture, CI/CD and delivery platform design, developer experience tooling, security and compliance architecture, or API and service design patterns.
Breadth to engage credibly across the full platform stack — from infrastructure and deployment through to application architecture, integration patterns, and developer experience.
Proven ability to influence technical direction without organizational authority, with examples of changing engineering decisions in ways that demonstrably improved outcomes.
Experience developing and ratifying architectural standards in an architecture governance context (ARB, TAB, or equivalent).
Strong written and verbal communication skills — able to produce architectural documentation and recommendations that are clear, accessible, and actually used by engineering teams.
Recognized within the broader software engineering community — through open source contributions, technical publications, conference participation, or active engagement in platform engineering or developer experience communities.

Nice To Haves

Experience in healthcare technology or regulated data environments where compliance requirements shape architectural choices at the platform level.
Familiarity with Internal Developer Platform (IDP) design patterns and self-service developer workflow automation.
Experience with AI/ML infrastructure patterns and the platform architectural requirements for AI-enabled tooling and inference-ready service design.
Experience operating in a federated engineering organization where platform architecture must influence without mandating.
Demonstrated ability to build architectural credibility across a distributed engineering organization through quality of thinking and trust built over time.
Graduate degree or recognized technical contributions (patents, publications, open-source projects, conference presentations) in relevant domains are valued.

Responsibilities

Own architectural direction for McKesson’s core platform domains, shaping platform investment decisions and establishing the technical standards that guide engineering teams across the organization.
Develop and ratify McKesson architectural standards through the ARB — researching problems, building options and rationale, and shepherding proposals through to adoption.
Build and maintain reference architectures and reusable patterns that give engineering teams a trusted framework for common problems.
Identify architectural debt, structural risks, and emerging gaps — and propose platform investments to address them before they become constraints or workarounds.
Maintain and socialize a technology radar across McKesson’s platform domains — a structured investment signal for what the organization should adopt, trial, assess, or avoid — and use it to inform multi-year platform architectural direction.
Serve as the embedded architectural partner on high-profile initiatives — present early enough to shape decisions, not late enough to create blockers.
Ensure new workloads are built using the platform as intended — applying established standards and avoiding workarounds that accumulate integration debt.
Surface gaps between platform capabilities and project requirements early, translating them into platform capability proposals rather than project-scoped solutions.
Stay close enough to the platform itself to identify when behavior diverges from intent and bring those findings back to the team.
Invest in the architectural capability of the broader engineering organization through design reviews, architecture guilds, and documentation.
Help develop architects and senior engineers who think at platform-wide scope — building the organizational capacity to sustain architectural coherence at scale.
Model the technical thinking that prevents re-platforming: long-horizon awareness, trade-off transparency, and the discipline to surface risks early.
Build credibility with engineering leaders across McKesson through the quality of thinking and the track record of decisions made better by this role’s involvement.
Serve as a technical thought partner to value stream engineering leaders on decisions with platform-wide implications, helping teams make choices that are locally sound and globally coherent.
Communicate architectural direction in ways that enable rather than constrain — clear frameworks, documented patterns, and governance processes lightweight enough to be respected.