Principal Digital Architect (Autonomy)

Caterpillar•Chicago, IL

23h•Onsite

About The Position

We are the Platform Architecture team responsible for defining, evolving, and governing the architecture of large-scale, mission-critical digital platforms that enable and support key business capabilities. As a Principal Digital Architect for the Autonomy Program, you will lead the design of end-to-end technical solutions that power autonomous equipment and systems, bridging the digital and physical worlds. You will be accountable for architecting scalable, secure, and resilient platforms that integrate edge, embedded, and cloud technologies. In this role, you will work extensively with diverse sensor and telemetry data streams—including images, LiDAR, and other real-time signals—to enable perception, decision-making, and control systems for autonomous operations. You will collaborate across engineering, data science, and product teams to translate business objectives into robust technical architectures and ensure alignment with enterprise standards.

Requirements

Architectural Thinking: Ability to decompose complex problem spaces and develop pragmatic architecture options with clearly articulated trade‑offs.
Technical Leadership: Influence without authority; guide teams through architectural decisions and implementation challenges.
Communication: Clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
Requirements Analysis: Translate business and non‑functional requirements into scalable technical designs.
Platform & Application Architecture: Strong foundation in designing modern application and platform architectures using established patterns and standards.
Experience architecting real-time, high-throughput data pipelines for low-latency decision systems using streaming platforms and event-driven patterns.
Experience designing architectures that process and filter high-volume sensor or telemetry data across edge and cloud environments.
Experience designing closed-loop systems where real-time data ingestion drives continuous decisioning and feedback into the system.
Strong understanding of temporal and spatial data modeling, including time-series processing and geospatial data handling.
Experience designing systems that support simulation, testing, and validation of autonomous behaviors at scale.
Strong programming background in Python and Java, with the ability to reason at code level.
Proven experience designing and building enterprise‑scale, distributed systems.
Hands‑on experience with cloud‑native architectures, including AWS services, containerization, and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
Deep understanding of data architecture: SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehouses (Snowflake specifically), data modeling, replication, and sharding.
Strong API design experience (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), including versioning and documentation.

Responsibilities

Own and define solution and platform architectures for large‑scale, distributed systems from concept through production.
Create architecture that meets high standards for scalability, performance, resilience, and security.
Partner closely with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams to ensure architectural alignment with business outcomes.
Assess, select, and introduce new technologies, including proof‑of‑concept development and architectural spikes.
Establish and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across platform teams.
Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to engineering teams, ensuring high‑quality implementation.
Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
Produce and maintain clear architecture documentation, including rationale and trade‑offs.
Continuously evolve platform architecture to improve developer productivity, system reliability, and cost efficiency.