Principal Architect

OneTrust•Atlanta, GA

3d•$196,500 - $294,750•Hybrid

About The Position

OneTrust is seeking a Principal Architect to set technical direction across its product platform as part of Architecture Services, the central architecture team. Principal Architects are senior individual-contributor technologists responsible for shaping multi-year architecture strategy, resolving cross-product domain challenges, and influencing key technical decisions. The role involves leading architecture strategy, ensuring cross-system integrity, establishing standards and governance, enabling AI-native architecture, fostering the architecture community, and partnering with executive leadership.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
16+ years of professional software engineering experience
Demonstrated impact on organization-wide technical strategy across multiple products or domains
Deep expertise in distributed, cloud-native architecture, including microservices, microfrontends, event-driven integration, and API design
Track record defining non-functional requirements and architecture governance at platform scale
Experience designing for security, privacy, and compliance requirements in enterprise SaaS
Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar), and a track record of helping teams adopt AI-native engineering practices

Nice To Haves

Experience with compliance frameworks such as GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO/IEC 27001 or 27701
Experience applying Team Topologies or similar operating models to architecture functions

Responsibilities

Lead the multi-year architecture strategy across OneTrust's product domains, working with domain architects to align their technical plans into one platform direction.
Lead resolution of cross-domain architectural challenges and align stakeholders on platform-wide technical direction.
Set direction for the platform's non-functional requirements, including security, privacy, reliability, performance, scalability, and cost.
Take part early in product discovery and roadmap planning to assess feasibility and identify risks before designs are final.
Propose R&D-wide architecture standards, reference architectures, and patterns to the Architecture Guild.
Guide the design documentation process, and apply governance that doesn't block delivery wherever possible.
Turn standards, reference architectures, and decision records into machine-readable context that AI coding agents use to follow our patterns.
Build and guide the adoption of automated architectural checks, such as fitness functions, architecture-as-code, and AI-assisted design review.
Build feedback loops that turn design decisions, review findings, and incident lessons into reusable context and patterns for future work.
Design standards and agent context that work across tools, and back them with evals that catch regressions against our architectural standards.
Help teams keep their delivery gains through tool changes and failed experiments.
Stay hands-on with prototypes, reference implementations, and design work.
Use AI agents to draft and test designs, explore trade-offs, and shorten feasibility work from weeks to days.
Maintain technical credibility and leadership through prototypes, reference implementations, architecture automation, and hands-on experimentation.
Develop domain and squad architects through mentoring and design coaching, and help define how architects grow in scope and influence at OneTrust.
Support R&D's Guilds, including the Architecture and AI Enablement Guilds, as centers of excellence that own and evolve engineering standards.
Provide the structure, facilitation, and hands-on help they need to define, pilot, and roll out those standards.
Lead the Architecture Guild as a community of practice through regular forums, design clinics, and retrospectives that share knowledge and bring systemic problems to light.
Define architecture scorecards for system health and standards adoption, and work with Developer Experience to build scorecards, templates, and catalog ownership into the developer workflow.
Partner with Engineering, Product, and UX leadership on R&D's key technical decisions, and represent architecture in executive forums.
Advise leadership on trade-offs in cost, risk, and delivery speed, and make the business case for architecture investments.