Principal Enterprise Architect - Tooling

Deluxe•Minneapolis, MN

18d•$140,000 - $165,000

About The Position

The Principal Enterprise Architect, Tooling facilitates the development of enterprise architectures and business capabilities aligned with organizational needs, using strong analysis, design, and architecture-modeling skills, including frameworks such as TOGAF. The role communicates solutions clearly and facilitates groups in developing aligned architectures. The position defines business-systems solutions at project or portfolio level and establishes architecture principles, guardrails, reference implementations, and governance artifacts such as C4 models, API specifications, and architecture decision records. It is responsible for implementing and stabilizing platform engineering at Deluxe, including toolchain automation, developer-experience tool management, and software-delivery platform management. The architect owns the delivery toolchain, defines supported delivery paths from commit to production, and leads the implementation of AI-enabled engineering tools and associated safeguards. The role translates business priorities into technical investment priorities, works with security, risk, and compliance on payment-data and delivery controls, mentors architects and senior engineers, facilitates architecture reviews, and communicates decisions, trade-offs, and risks to executive, business, and engineering audiences. The compensation range is $140,000 to $165,000 annually. The position is eligible for commission or an annual performance incentive plan. Actual base pay varies based on job-related knowledge, skills, location, experience, and internal equity. Benefits may vary by role, location, or hours worked.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in IT or a related field.
10 or more years in software engineering, solution architecture, or platform engineering, including architecture experience on distributed, high-availability systems.
Must be 18 years of age or older.

Nice To Haves

Experience in payments, fintech, merchant services, or a comparably regulated transaction-processing domain.
Ownership of an enterprise CI/CD platform, including pipeline-as-code, templating and reuse at scale, RBAC design, secrets management, and multi-team governance; experience with Harness, GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions with Argo or Spinnaker, or Jenkins operated at scale.
Experience integrating security scanning into delivery pipelines and setting policy gates that engineering teams accept.
Depth in API and integration architecture, including REST, asynchronous messaging, event-driven patterns, and API lifecycle governance.
Experience with AWS, AWS services, cloud-native architecture, and Kubernetes in production.
Track record of influencing technical direction across teams without reporting authority and explaining trade-offs to executives.
Hands-on Harness product experience across multiple modules, particularly CI/CD, STO, SEI, or CCM.
Policy-as-code experience, such as OPA/Rego or comparable.
Cloud cost management or FinOps practice ownership, including showback or chargeback implementation.
Applied generative AI or agentic development patterns to real engineering workflows, including governance.
Architecture leadership for large-scale API ecosystems, partner platforms, or merchant-facing onboarding.
PCI DSS-aligned controls, IAM, or fraud/risk integration experience.
Hands-on experience with .NET, Java, Go, or Node.js and a GitHub or Atlassian toolchain.

Responsibilities

Facilitate, conceptualize, and define business-systems solutions of moderate scope and complexity in alignment with Deluxe's vision at project or portfolio level.
Set architecture principles, guardrails, and reference implementations, and govern C4 models, API specifications, and architecture decision records.
Implement and stabilize platform engineering, including toolchain automation, developer-experience tool management, and software-delivery platform management.
Own the delivery toolchain, including source control, issue tracking, artifact management, static analysis, test infrastructure and integration architecture, entitlement and license management, upgrade and migration planning, and consolidation of redundant tools.
Define documented, supported golden paths for teams to move from commit to production, with deviations treated as explicit decisions.
Lead implementation of AI-enabled tools for design, code generation, testing, and documentation, and establish evaluation criteria, human-review requirements, context and data-handling standards, and governance for generated code entering production.
Translate business priorities into prioritized technical investment with product and business leaders.
Work with security, risk, and compliance teams on payment-data protection, identity, access control, auditability, and delivery-pipeline change control.
Mentor architects and senior engineers, facilitate architecture reviews, and build alignment among technical leaders.
Communicate decisions, trade-offs, and risks to executive, business, and engineering audiences.