Principal Commerce Architect

White Cap

About The Position

A position at White Cap isn’t your ordinary job. You’ll work in an exciting and diverse environment, meet interesting people, and have a variety of career opportunities. The White Cap family is committed to Building Trust on Every Job. We do this by being deeply knowledgeable, fully capable, and always dependable, and our associates are the driving force behind this commitment. Job Summary Top level technical expert in one or more highly specialized phases of applications programming. Provides design recommendations based on long-term IT organization strategy. Provides expertise regarding the integration of applications across the business. Defines, designs, and oversees the systems and applications architecture for both current and future business applications. Evaluates new and emerging technologies and developmental methodologies to find faster, cost effective, and more reliable solutions for existing and proposed systems. Partners with infrastructure, application, and quality teams to ensure that applications meet business requirements, are well documented, and have processes in place for ongoing support and maintenance. Scopes and implements appropriate process improvement tools and techniques such as Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, and ITIL. Drives standard and efficient applications and infrastructure design by aligning the infrastructure roadmap with the application technology strategy, hardware vendor roadmaps, and service capabilities. Applies judgment in implementing Application Engineering methodologies, processes, and practices to specific requirements of projects/programs which may include product design engineering, information security, code maintainability, and reliability. Work closely with developers and engineers to develop road maps for applications, align development plans, and to ensure effective integration among information systems and the IT infrastructure. Monitor technological advancements to ensure that solutions are continuously improved, supported, and aligned with industry and company standards as well as emerging business requirements. Solutions require analysis and investigation. Achieves planned results by decisions and actions based on professional methods, business principles, and practical experience. May recommend/make decisions regarding new programs/initiatives that have significant impact to the business and carry consequences in unsuccessful endeavors. Manages a larger team or multiple small teams through direction of subordinate management and/or supervisory staff. The Principal Commerce Architect is the technical authority for the organization’s digital commerce ecosystem. This role sets the target architecture and standards for how commerce capabilities (browse, search, cart, checkout, promotions, pricing, payments, order lifecycle, customer/identity, content, and analytics) are designed, integrated, secured, and scaled across web, mobile, in-store, marketplaces, and emerging channels. The Principal Commerce Architect partners with Product, Engineering, UX, Security, Data, and Operations to deliver a high-performing, resilient, and adaptable commerce platform—balancing customer experience, speed-to-market, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Requirements

Typically requires BS/BA in a related discipline.
Generally 7+ years of experience in a related field.
May require certification.
Advanced degree may offset less experience in some disciplines.
Typically requires BS/BA in a related discipline.
Generally 8+ years of experience in a related field OR MS/MA and generally 5+ years of experience in a related field.
Certification is required in some areas.

Nice To Haves

7+ years in software engineering with 2+ years leading engineers as a tech lead or team lead.
Hands-on with Optimizely Commerce (B2B/Configured Commerce Cloud) in headless mode (APIs/webhooks/content delivery), collaborating closely with platform teams—no .NET required.
Production experience with React and Next.js (SSR/ISR, routing/app router, middleware, caching/CDN strategies) and a Node.js/TypeScript BFF.
Proven delivery of incremental migrations (page-by-page/strangler pattern) in production at scale.
Hands-on A/B testing experience in web commerce using experimentation platforms (e.g., Optimizely Experimentation/Feature Flags, Adobe Target, VWO), with working knowledge of test design, power/significance, uplift measurement, and guardrail metrics.
Experience building real-time/event-driven systems on Azure middleware (Event Grid, Service Bus/Event Hubs, Functions/Durable Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, Azure SignalR), including idempotency, retries/DLQs, backpressure, and observability.

Responsibilities

Commerce architecture leadership Own the end-to-end architecture for commerce capabilities across the customer journey (pre-purchase to post-purchase).
Define reference architectures, architectural standards, design patterns, and reusable components for commerce teams.
Lead architecture governance: architecture reviews, decision records (ADRs), and alignment to enterprise standards.
Solution design for strategic initiatives Architect large initiatives such as replatforming, headless transformation, omnichannel enablement, and major integrations.
Produce high-quality solution artifacts: logical/physical diagrams, sequence flows, non-functional requirements (NFRs), integration contracts, and deployment views.
Ensure designs address scalability, observability, resiliency, and failover for peak events (e.g., promotions/holiday traffic).
Platform and vendor evaluation Participate in technology selection and evaluation (RFPs, PoCs) for commerce platforms and ecosystem tools (OMS, PIM, CMS, search, payments, tax, fraud, CDP/CRM).
Provide architectural guidance for vendor integrations and ensure solutions avoid unnecessary lock-in when possible.
Partner with Procurement/Vendor Management to assess solution risk, cost, and contractual considerations from an architecture perspective.
Integration and data architecture Define integration patterns for commerce services and systems of record (ERP, CRM, OMS/WMS, loyalty, customer service, finance).
Drive API strategy (REST/GraphQL), event-driven messaging, canonical models, and data quality/lineage where applicable.
Collaborate with Data/Analytics teams to ensure reliable event instrumentation and consistent commerce metrics.
Security, privacy, and compliance Ensure architecture aligns with security and compliance requirements: PCI-DSS (payments), PII protection, GDPR/CCPA, authentication/authorization, secrets management.
Partner with Security and Risk teams on threat modeling, secure design reviews, and compliance controls.
Engineering enablement and mentorship Mentor solution architects, technical leads and senior engineers; raise architecture maturity across teams.
Establish best practices for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, and release strategies for commerce services.
Promote operational excellence: observability, SRE practices, incident prevention, and post-incident learning.