Principal Solutions Architect & Set-Up

NRG • Seattle, WA

5d • $210,000 - $245,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG-owned company, is hiring a Principal Solutions Architect to own the holistic technical view of how devices are set up and remain connected. The role spans end-to-end architecture across panel firmware, cloud services, mobile applications, device radios, and home networks, with the goal of making installations faster and more reliable. The architect will identify where product behavior currently resides and define architectural changes that improve installation time, installation quality, product reliability, and customer trust.

The position works across hardware, embedded, platform, cloud, and mobile engineering, in close partnership with product, design, QA, data, and field operations. It also serves as a technical representative to external service providers and device manufacturers, evaluating and integrating third-party networking, diagnostics, and observability services and ensuring new devices fit the product ecosystem. The role is suited to a deeply technical leader who drives decisions through architecture and evidence, influences without authority, and takes ownership of cross-team technical boundaries.

The role requires in-office presence in Seattle, Washington, on a hybrid schedule: onsite Monday through Thursday and working from home on Friday. It will start remotely before moving to the hybrid schedule.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of experience in software or systems engineering, including significant experience as an architect or technical lead on distributed systems involving physical devices.
• Deep, hands-on understanding of connected-device architecture, including device provisioning and commissioning, cloud-to-device connectivity, over-the-air firmware updates, and fleet telemetry at scale.
• Working knowledge of home networking and connectivity protocols, including Wi-Fi, consumer mesh systems, band steering, multicast and mDNS behavior, BLE, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, and cellular backhaul.
• Experience evaluating, selecting, and integrating third-party platforms and services, and owning the technical side of a vendor relationship through production.
• Direct experience working with hardware manufacturers, ODMs, or silicon vendors on new product development, including reviewing requirements and influencing design decisions early.
• Ability to influence without authority across embedded, cloud, mobile, and hardware organizations and build alignment on a multi-year architectural direction.
• Exceptional written communication skills, including the ability to create useful technical documents for both executives and firmware engineers.
• Analytical rigor with reliability and observability data, including defining metrics to verify whether architectural changes have worked.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain a holistic architectural view of setup and device connectivity across panel firmware, cloud services, mobile applications, and device radios, including documenting where product behavior lives and where it should live.
• Partner with engineering leadership to propose, sequence, and socialize architectural changes that reduce installation time and improve installation quality.
• Define device health telemetry and self-healing architecture so devices report connectivity health and recover from common home network events without technician intervention or customer support calls.
• Lead build-versus-buy evaluations for networking, diagnostics, and observability services, and own the technical integration of selected services into the platform, data model, and security and privacy posture.
• Work with device makers, ODMs, and silicon partners during new product development to integrate commissioning and operating protocols, provisioning flows, update mechanisms, and telemetry hooks.
• Write architecture evaluations, reference designs, and decision records to support shared tradeoffs across protocols, performance, diagnostics, and recovery.
• Diagnose real-world failure patterns using field, telemetry, and customer support data, and turn findings into prioritized architectural work tied to measurable outcomes.
• Advise product leadership on roadmap and strategy, including device-category protocol strategy and architecture for next-generation hardware.

Benefits

• Free daily lunch and drinks on site
• Paid holidays
• Flexible paid time away
• Employee, friends, and family discounts
• Onsite health clinic
• Onsite gym
• Onsite gaming tables
• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• Life coverage
• 24/7 medical hotline
• 401(k) with employer match
• Employee Resource Groups
• Quarterly Innovation Weeks
• Potential annual bonus, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards
• Flexible spending accounts

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed