Principal Architect

Accommodations Plus International•Melville, NY

4d•Onsite

About The Position

This is a high-impact architecture role for someone who thinks in systems, speaks in trade-offs, and has genuine hands-on experience designing for the age of AI. As Principal Architect, you'll set the technical direction for how we build, integrate, and evolve complex software systems — spanning cloud-native services, data-backed applications, and AI-powered workflows. You'll work across engineering disciplines, bringing coherence to architectural decisions that affect multiple product teams and long-term platform health. This isn't a governance role. You'll be deeply engaged with engineering teams, shaping how AI agents and LLM-driven workflows are designed, governed, and integrated responsibly — where security and compliance matter as much as velocity.

Requirements

10–15 years in software engineering, with significant time in principal or staff architect roles across complex, multi-team environments
Strong cloud architecture experience on AWS — services, networking, data, and security patterns at scale
Proven experience designing and architecting AI-integrated systems — including LLMs, agentic patterns, RAG, and tool-use orchestration
Familiarity with the AI development lifecycle: model evaluation, observability, responsible AI practices, and iterative improvement
Broad engineering background across backend services (Java ecosystem preferred), APIs, event-driven architecture, and data systems
Experience in regulated environments (PCI/PII) with a track record of building compliance into design rather than adding it after
Comfortable working at multiple altitudes — from whiteboard architecture to reviewing a pull request when it matters
Ability to make complex things clearer
Strong writing skills for ARB’s, design docs, and technical strategy
Ability to earn influence through the quality of thinking, not title
Excitement about AI possibilities coupled with a clear-eyed view of risks

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the architectural blueprint for core systems, including cloud-native services on AWS, Java backends, Angular front-ends, and data layers (Postgres/Oracle).
Lead the architectural design of AI-enabled systems: LLM integrations, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-use patterns, and multi-agent orchestration.
Define how AI capabilities are composed into products safely and at scale.
Shape how AI systems are designed, evaluated, monitored, and iterated — from prompt engineering and model selection through to evaluation frameworks, observability, drift detection, and responsible deprecation.
Define integration patterns across services, APIs, event-driven systems, and AI components — ensuring cohesion, resilience, and clear contracts between system boundaries.
Embed security, PCI/PII compliance, and responsible AI controls into architectural defaults in partnership with AppSec and risk functions.
Raise the architectural thinking of senior engineers and tech leads through direct engagement, clear documentation, and collaborative design.
Produce Gate 0 (ROM) and Gate 1 (detailed) architecture estimates for initiatives, with clearly documented assumptions, risk flags, and dependency inventories.
Understand the current architecture landscape, identify gaps, and areas of inconsistent decision-making.
Publish reference architecture and roadmaps for business units.
Establish regular architectural touchpoints with engineering leads and scale adoption across teams.