Principal Architect

Brinks Home•Farmers Branch, TX

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Architect in the IT Technology Enablement team is a senior, strategic, and hands-on technical leader who works across development, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and future-ready platforms that enable application teams to build, deploy, and operate software at scale. This REMOTE role is responsible for ensuring core platform stability while shaping and executing our long-range platform strategy, including containerization, data center virtualization, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The architect must balance long-term architectural vision with practical delivery.

Requirements

Deep expertise in platform and infrastructure architecture, including onprem and cloud environments.
Strong experience with Azure cloud platforms, virtualization, and container technologies.
Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and automation.
Solid understanding of distributed systems, security architecture, resilience, and observability.
Strong background in DevOps, SRE, and observability (logging, metrics, tracing).
Experience designing and governing security architectures (identity, secrets, network segmentation, zero trust).
Practical experience evaluating and applying AI-assisted tools for architecture analysis, development productivity, or operational insights.
Familiarity with architecture documentation and modeling tools (e.g., Lucidchart, Draw.io, PlantUML, ADRs).
Ability to clearly document and communicate architectural decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
7-10+ years of professional experience in software, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
3–5+ years in senior technical leadership roles, such as Senior Architect, Lead Architect, Staff/Principal Engineer, or equivalent.
Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale platforms used by multiple teams or products.
Prior experience in long-term architectural planning.
Demonstrated success in reliability improvement.
Track record of transitioning platforms through modernization efforts (e.g., on-prem to cloud, legacy CI/CD to modern pipelines).
Experience working closely with security, operations, and governance functions in regulated or enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

Define, evolve, and govern platform architecture across cloud infrastructure, shared services, CI/CD, observability, and developer tooling with a strong focus on stability, reliability, and scalability.
Lead architectural strategy for container platforms (e.g. AKS) and orchestration, data center and cloud virtualization, and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and automation.
Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-enabled platform capabilities, and guide their adoption where they add clear value.
Ensure architectures are designed for performance, fault tolerance, security, compliance, and cost efficiency across distributed systems.
Document and communicate architectural decisions through ADRs, diagrams, and standards documentation, ensuring clarity and traceability.
Translate complex technical concepts into clear business-level trade-offs and recommendations.
Provide technical mentorship to architects and technical leads; guide architectural thinking across teams.
Promote architectural consistency while enabling team autonomy and innovation.