Principal Solution Architect

7-Eleven • Irving, TX

1d

About The Position

7-Eleven’s Store Technology organization is seeking a Principal Architect to lead technical architecture for point-of-sale (POS) and related store technology platforms. This fully hands-on role supports the POS team through solution design, coding, prototyping, code reviews, troubleshooting, and production issue resolution. The architect partners with Product, Store Operations, Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable software.

The role owns the technical vision, target architecture, and roadmap for POS applications and supporting platforms. It combines hands-on engineering with architecture leadership, including designing transaction-oriented systems, modernizing legacy platforms, guiding quality and security practices, and improving production operations. The architect mentors engineers and technical leads, communicates trade-offs and recommendations to stakeholders and senior leadership, and champions a KPI-driven engineering culture focused on customer impact, business outcomes, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree (four-year degree).
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years of hands-on architecture or technical leadership on enterprise-scale systems.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture, distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, integration patterns, and secure software development.
• Hands-on programming and software design skills, including the ability to read, write, debug, and review production code for POS systems.
• Experience designing transaction-processing systems for high volume, low latency, availability, resiliency, and offline or intermittently connected operation.
• Expertise in APIs, messaging, data modeling, relational and NoSQL databases, service boundaries, and integration contracts.
• Advanced experience with cloud, DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerization, platform engineering, observability dashboards, service health metrics, SLOs/SLIs, and production operations.
• Quality Engineering expertise across automation frameworks, performance and resilience testing, TDD, BDD, and test strategy.
• Experience with security architecture, threat modeling, identity and access controls, encryption, secrets management, compliance, and secure delivery.
• Ability to modernize legacy systems to maintainable cloud-native services with minimal business disruption.
• Strong troubleshooting experience with monitoring, distributed tracing, incident response, disaster recovery, root-cause analysis, and problem management.
• Sound architecture judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability and clearly explaining trade-offs.
• Strong documentation, stakeholder management, vendor evaluation, estimation, planning, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree.
• Experience in retail, store technology, POS, self-checkout, or payments.
• Experience designing or modernizing legacy POS, store, edge, or device-integrated systems to cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with payment flows, transaction integrity, device integrations, store networking, offline processing, reconciliation, or near-zero-downtime migrations.
• Experience partnering with product, store operations, vendors, security, infrastructure, and cross-functional technology teams.
• Experience integrating hardware through JPOS/OPOS interfaces or vendor device drivers/SDKs using Java or C++.
• Knowledge of PCI DSS, EMV, payment-terminal integration, encryption, tokenization, and key management.
• Experience containerizing and running Windows-based applications on Linux using Docker-compatible runtimes.
• Experience applying AI/ML, generative AI, or intelligent automation to software delivery, observability, support, or retail operations.
• Knowledge of or experience with Java, C, C++, Node.js, React, Windows Application Development, REST APIs, Spring Boot, JSON, MongoDB, NoSQL databases, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, enterprise integration patterns, and domain-driven design.
• Knowledge of or experience with AWS, Azure, EC2, Lambda, Fargate, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway, Kinesis, Auto Scaling, CloudFormation, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of or experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Loki, New Relic, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, observability dashboards, and service health metrics.
• Knowledge of or experience with Agile, SAFe Agile, CI/CD, TDD, BDD, Quality Engineering, QCE, continuous improvement, and SSDLC.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, target architecture, and architecture roadmap for POS applications, services, integrations, APIs, data, and supporting store technology platforms.
• Write production-quality code, build prototypes and proofs of concept, troubleshoot complex defects, and contribute to critical implementation work.
• Translate business, product, and store requirements into solution designs, technical specifications, architecture decision records, and executable delivery plans.
• Define and evolve architecture patterns for application services, REST APIs, integrations, data access, messaging, event-driven workflows, offline capabilities, and store-to-cloud communication.
• Lead architecture, design, code, and technical deep-dive reviews; set engineering standards and provide actionable guidance to improve software quality and maintainability.
• Design transaction-oriented systems for high volume, low latency, availability, resiliency, security, and graceful operation during connectivity or downstream service interruptions; define supporting non-functional requirements.
• Evaluate technologies, frameworks, platforms, and vendor solutions through experimentation, benchmarks, technical assessments, and total-cost-of-ownership analysis.
• Guide modernization of legacy POS and store systems toward maintainable cloud-native services while managing technical risk, compatibility, migration sequencing, and business disruption.
• Partner with Cyber Security and Enterprise Architecture to embed security controls, privacy, compliance, governance, threat modeling, and secure software development practices.
• Drive CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, containerized deployments, automated testing, release engineering, and disciplined environment management.
• Work with engineering and operations teams to diagnose incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and improve monitoring, alerting, observability dashboards, and actionable metrics.
• Define quality engineering strategies across unit, integration, contract, functional, performance, resilience, and regression testing for POS and retail systems.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads through design collaboration, pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing; create architecture documentation, API contracts, runbooks, release plans, and sustainable handoffs.
• Communicate architecture options, trade-offs, risks, dependencies, estimates, and recommendations to engineering teams, stakeholders, and senior leadership.
• Establish and champion a KPI-driven engineering culture using data, operational metrics, customer impact, and business outcomes to guide architecture, prioritization, investment decisions, and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership during major production incidents, driving mitigation, root-cause analysis, and resilient architectural improvements to prevent repeat failures and minimize future business impact.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal