Principal Enterprise Architect

Celigo

4d•$175,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

At Celigo, we believe integration should empower — not exhaust — innovation. As a modern Integration and Automation Platform (iPaaS), we’re on a mission to simplify how companies integrate, automate, and optimize processes. Powered by game-changing technology like runtime AI and prebuilt, mission-critical integrations, Celigo is redefining how businesses connect their world. Celigo is looking for a Principal Enterprise Architect who sees the whole estate before they see the parts. This is a founding role: you will build Celigo’s enterprise architecture practice from scratch, turning a highly federated, ungoverned technology portfolio into a rationalized, outcome-aligned estate. You will govern through influence rather than authority, use AI to analyze the portfolio at scale, and work through GTO’s domain leads to turn findings into real action. If you are energized by converting complexity into clarity and by setting standards that actually get adopted, this is the role for you.

Requirements

You see the whole estate when others see individual tools. You ask “why do we have this?” before “how do we use it?” and you convert that curiosity into a rationalization plan that gets executed, not shelved.
You govern through influence. You build credibility simultaneously with engineering leads, Finance, and business stakeholders, and you align them on trade-offs without needing a veto card.
You connect architecture decisions to business outcomes as a reflex. When you recommend retiring a system or consolidating vendors, the business hears a gain, not just a technical preference.
You ship forward: a solid framework teams can use today is worth more than a perfect standard that lands six months late. You set direction, get adoption started, and iterate on real feedback rather than waiting for complete information.
You are energized by finding new ways to apply AI to your own work, whether that means analyzing a 200-app portfolio, drafting a governance policy, or surfacing a renewal risk before a contract auto-renews.
You take ownership beyond your defined scope. When you see a gap in system accountability or a contract heading toward auto-renewal without review, you move on it before being asked.
10+ years in enterprise or solution architecture, with demonstrated ownership of an application portfolio and architecture standards at a software or high-growth company.
Proven track record of application rationalization and SaaS cost reduction. You have personally driven consolidation and renegotiation that produced real, measurable savings.
Deep fluency with enterprise architecture frameworks and lifecycle governance, including TOGAF-style practice, adopt/hold/retire classification, and architecture review board processes.
Strong build-vs-buy and total-cost-of-ownership judgment, with experience partnering with Procurement, Finance, and Security on vendor decisions.
Working knowledge of AI and agentic governance concepts, including least-privilege and least-agency architecture, control points, and data access patterns.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience using AI tooling to analyze and govern a portfolio at scale
Experience with iPaaS or integration platforms and a point of view on Customer Zero
Background in FinOps or SaaS spend management tooling

Responsibilities

Build the EA practice from scratch. Define the operating model, establish architecture principles, and stand up a lightweight review process where the right decision is the easy decision. You will set the scope, prioritize what to govern first, publish a standards catalog and decision log, and create the shared language GTO works from.
Own the application portfolio end to end. Build and maintain the inventory, classify every app by lifecycle status (adopt, hold, retire), and drive consolidation of redundant and duplicative tools. When you surface overlap, you act on it rather than filing a memo about it.
Lead build-vs-buy with a Celigo-first lens. Start every evaluation with Celigo’s own platform as Customer Zero, weigh decisions against architecture principles and total cost of ownership, and make the recommendation land by connecting it to the business outcome that actually matters.
Stand up SaaS governance and cost control. Own the SaaS policy, implement a management solution for full portfolio visibility, and partner with Procurement and Finance to act on savings rather than just identify them. Treat every contract renewal as an opportunity to consolidate capability or recover budget.
Use AI to govern the estate at scale. Analyze the full portfolio with AI tools to surface consolidation targets, flag renewal risk before it becomes urgency, and generate the prioritized action lists that drive productive conversations with Finance, Procurement, and domain leads. Then close the loop by acting on what you find.
Extend architecture discipline to the AI estate. Define control points, approval paths, and a least-agency framework so agents operate with scoped permissions and governance that enables speed rather than blocking it. Partner with the AI Platform team to set MCP standards, data-access patterns, and evaluation criteria so every team builds on a consistent, secure foundation.
Tie every architecture decision to a business outcome. Align the technology roadmap to Celigo’s goals and ROI in partnership with leadership, Finance, and business stakeholders. You will know the practice is working when business teams come to you before they commit to a new vendor.
Grow architecture capability across GTO without building a parallel team. Scale the practice through embedded domain architects and a community of practice, so the whole organization becomes more architecturally sound rather than routing every decision through a single bottleneck.