Principal Architect, Platform Modernization

isolved•,

About The Position

The Principal Architect, Platform Modernization is a senior individual contributor leading the hands-on decomposition of isolved's HCM monolith into modern, independently deployable microservices. Working within the Platform Pod, this role operates at the intersection of deep technical execution and cross-team architectural influence. The Principal Architect is not an order-taker - they have real input into decomposition approach, sequencing, and tooling decisions, while staying grounded in the day-to-day work of getting domains out of the monolith and into production. isolved is extracting core domains from a 7M+ line HCM monolith - live, in production - using the Strangler Fig pattern to decompose Tax, Benefits, Time, Payroll, and Shared Logic into event-driven services on Azure Container Apps, each with its own Cosmos DB. These are small, highly skilled teams operating with modern AI tooling, and the expectation at this level is high.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience at the principal or staff level.
Hands-on experience decomposing a production monolith - including dealing with data coupling, hidden dependencies, and live system constraints.
Deep .NET / C# expertise and strong distributed systems fundamentals.
Direct experience with Cosmos DB, including data modeling for document storage and the tradeoffs of migrating from a relational schema.
Solid command of event-driven architecture: messaging, CDC, eventual consistency, and idempotency.
Experience writing and owning Terraform for service infrastructure.
Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development tools as a daily productivity practice.
Ability to engage as a peer in high-level architectural decisions while staying grounded in hands-on technical work.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical tradeoffs to engineers, architects, and engineering leadership.

Nice To Haves

HCM, payroll, benefits, or tax domain experience.
Familiarity with Dapr, Azure Service Bus, Azure Container Apps, or Azure API Management.
Debezium or similar CDC tooling experience.

Responsibilities

Executes hands-on decomposition of core HCM domains from a large .NET monolith into microservices on Azure Container Apps using Strangler Fig patterns, anti-corruption layers, and event-driven integration via Dapr and Azure Service Bus.
Owns domain-level Cosmos DB design including partition strategy, data modeling, consistency levels, and indexing, migrating from a shared SQL Server schema to a document model.
Defines and provisions infrastructure using Terraform as a standard part of delivery, not a downstream handoff.
Integrates extracted services with isolved's identity platform and Azure API Management following established paved road architecture standards.
Implements CDC-based data strategies (Debezium) to maintain reporting continuity throughout domain extraction.
Contributes to technical decisions on decomposition sequencing, seam identification, and shared infrastructure across the platform program.
Surfaces and resolves cross-workstream dependencies, participating in peer-level technical discourse across teams and workstreams.
Uses AI-assisted development - agentic coding, spec-driven development, AI code review - as a core part of daily practice and models its adoption across the team.
Anticipates broad architectural changes and ensures isolved's platform stays ahead of emerging distributed systems patterns and tooling.