Software Architect

Applied Materials•Benicia, CA

1d•$132,000 - $181,500•Onsite

About The Position

The Software Architect defines and drives the technical vision, architecture, and design of complex software products and platforms. The role provides technical leadership across development teams and ensures solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with product strategy and business objectives.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant responsibility for architecture and system design.
Strong knowledge of software architecture patterns, object-oriented design, distributed systems, APIs, and modular application design.
Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as C++, C#, Java, or Python.
Experience with software development lifecycle practices, Agile delivery, CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing, and code-quality tools.
Proven ability to analyze complex requirements, make sound technical decisions, and communicate trade-offs to technical and business stakeholders.
Strong problem-solving, influencing, collaboration, and written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting large-scale, high-reliability, customer-facing, industrial, or hardware-coupled software systems.
Knowledge of cloud-native technologies, containers, microservices, high-performance computing, AI/ML, or data-intensive architectures.
Experience in semiconductor equipment, inspection, metrology, imaging, automation, or other complex engineering domains.
Track record of leading technical transformation, reducing technical debt, and improving engineering productivity and product quality.
Experience working with globally distributed and cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

Define and own the end-to-end software architecture for assigned products, platforms, and major subsystems.
Translate product, functional, and non-functional requirements into robust technical solution concepts and architectural designs.
Lead architecture and design reviews, approve technical solutions, and establish software design principles, standards, and best practices.
Protect the product design from erosion by identifying technical debt, refactoring needs, infrastructure limitations, and long-term scalability risks.
Guide technology selection, system integration, API strategy, modularity, performance optimization, and modernization initiatives.
Collaborate with product management, systems, algorithms, hardware, DevOps, quality, and field teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
Provide hands-on technical guidance through design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, and resolution of complex technical blockers.
Mentor technical leads and engineers, strengthen architectural thinking, and promote knowledge sharing across the engineering community.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption based on technical value, risk, return on investment, and organizational alignment.
Support delivery and operational readiness by ensuring software quality, reliability, debuggability, maintainability, security, and performance.