Principal Software Architect

Abacus Insights•Boston, MA

9h•Remote

About The Position

Abacus Insights is seeking an experienced Principal Software Architect to set the technical vision for how Abacus builds, secures, and scales its healthcare data platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role focused on architecture leadership. The architect will translate business and customer needs into target-state architectures across data, applications, cloud, and agent-assisted engineering, and mentor engineers and Solution Architects. Key responsibilities include building reusable application foundations like design systems and blueprints, defining integration contracts, and establishing production-readiness gates. The role also involves translating architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics for AI-assisted development, ensuring AI-generated output meets high quality standards. The architect will guide decisions across data, application, integration, cloud, and agentic development, working pragmatically with Product Engineering, XPORT Principal Engineering, AI Engineering, Security, and Client Solutions. The role requires a deep understanding of cloud platforms (AWS/Azure), data platforms, modern application architectures, and agentic/AI-enabled engineering, with a strong preference for experience in healthcare data ecosystems and compliance frameworks like HITRUST/GovRamp. Excellent communication and stakeholder alignment skills are essential.

Requirements

15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in senior architecture roles designing and guiding complex cloud, data, integration, and application solutions from discovery through production operation.
Demonstrated experience setting enterprise-level architecture standards and mentoring engineers or architects without formal management authority – Principal-level IC leadership, not a people-management track.
Deep, hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), including containers, Kubernetes, Git-based CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), observability, and secure production operations.
Strong experience with data platforms and distributed data processing (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Spark) and with modern application and service architectures (Python, API-first services, React/TypeScript front-ends), identity and authorization, and multi-tenant SaaS patterns.
Working knowledge of agentic and AI-enabled engineering – LLM-enabled applications, MCP/A2A , LangGraph or comparable orchestration, AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., Cursor), Agent Driven Development and Harnesses retrieval/context patterns, evaluation, and responsible AI controls.
Understanding of healthcare payer, provider, clinical, and claims data ecosystems, or the ability to ramp quickly in a regulated data domain.
Familiarity with HITRUST, GovRamp, or comparable compliance and control frameworks, and the ability to design for privacy, least privilege, auditability, and secure SDLC.
Excellent communication skills – able to align senior business and technical stakeholders, explain trade-offs, and produce clear architecture artifacts for both technical and non-technical audiences.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience building or maintaining reference architectures, design systems, or developer platforms used by multiple teams.
Experience defining architecture standards, rules, or evaluation rubrics for AI- or agent-assisted development workflows.
Experience with FHIR-based interoperability or other healthcare data exchange standards.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the reference architecture for Abacus's core platform – data ingestion, transformation, distribution, and serving.
Set and enforce architecture standards for scaling, high availability/disaster recovery design, serverless patterns, and multi-tenant SaaS architecture across AWS and Azure environments.
Guide architecture for HITRUST and GovRamp compliance alignment.
Design scalable architectures for payer data solutions spanning claims, membership, provider, clinical, lab, and pharmacy/Rx domains.
Apply FHIR-based interoperability patterns and healthcare data standards.
Establish data contracts, lineage, quality controls, metadata, and integration patterns.
Own the design system and front-end/UX standards for Data Solutions applications.
Define standard user-management capabilities – tenant setup, roles, permissions, and admin experiences.
Translate approved architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics for agent-assisted development workflows.
Evaluate agent-generated code and designs against architectural gold standards, and build scoring and review mechanisms.
Partner with AI Engineering on semantic/context layers, agent interfaces, retrieval patterns, AI gateways, evaluation, traceability, and governed model access.
Be an active senior member and contributor to Abacus's Architecture and Data Guilds.
Mentor engineers and Solution Architects through pairing on designs, reviews, and pilots.
Establish lightweight architecture review mechanisms.
Ensure every architecture package includes deployment topology, support model, rollback strategy, and operational telemetry.
Hold designs to a resiliency bar appropriate for Abacus's scale and help teams reason through trade-offs between delivery speed and operational risk.