Principal Enterprise Architect

Principal Enterprise Architect – Distributed Systems & Cloud Platforms

We're working with an organisation undertaking a major technology transformation, modernising critical enterprise platforms that process high-volume, business-critical transactions. This is an opportunity to influence the architecture of large-scale, cloud-native systems and work alongside highly experienced engineering professionals delivering next-generation technology solutions.

This role is ideal for an experienced Solution Architect who enjoys solving complex technical challenges, defining enterprise architecture standards, and helping engineering teams deliver scalable, resilient software.

As a Senior Solution Architect, you'll take ownership of designing modern distributed solutions across enterprise platforms. You'll work closely with engineering, platform, security and business stakeholders to create architectures that support reliability, scalability and long-term maintainability.

Key responsibilities include:

• Define end-to-end solution architectures for enterprise applications from concept through to delivery.
• Design scalable cloud-native systems using microservices, event-driven architecture and messaging technologies.
• Establish architectural principles, governance and technical standards across multiple engineering teams.
• Create resilient data integration solutions supporting both real-time streaming and scheduled batch processing.
• Design messaging solutions using Kafka or similar event streaming technologies, ensuring reliable communication between services.
• Develop data integration strategies that support secure, efficient and highly available information exchange.
• Produce architecture documentation, technical roadmaps and design artefacts.
• Collaborate with platform engineering, DevOps and security teams to ensure solutions meet operational and compliance requirements.
• Review technical designs and provide architectural guidance throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Support the resolution of complex technical issues spanning applications, infrastructure, integration and data services.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements to the organisation's technology landscape.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads on architecture, distributed computing and modern software design principles.

What We're Looking For

• Enterprise application architecture within complex distributed environments.
• Large-scale event-driven platforms and messaging-based systems.
• High-volume transaction processing or data-intensive applications.
• Integration of multiple technologies, platforms and enterprise data sources.
• Architecture governance, design standards and technical strategy.
• Defining non-functional requirements including scalability, resilience, availability, performance and security.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• A proactive mindset with strong ownership and problem-solving capabilities.

Technical Experience

• Java or Python application development.
• Building scalable, high-performance distributed services.
• Apache Kafka or equivalent messaging/event streaming platforms.
• Microservices, Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and event-driven architecture.
• Object-oriented design and software engineering best practices.
• Kubernetes and container-based deployment strategies.
• Multi-region resilience, disaster recovery and high availability design.
• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or comparable tooling.
• AWS and cloud-native platform services.
• DevOps practices and CI/CD tooling such as Git, Jenkins, Docker, ArgoCD and Artifactory.
• OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT authentication and modern identity management concepts.
• Protocol Buffers and schema versioning.
• Modern data platforms including lakehouse architectures and technologies such as Apache Iceberg.

Compensation

• $200-230k base salary
• 30% bonus
• 27 days PTO
• 6% 401k Match
• Health, Vision, Dental and Life plans

This is a hybrid role, based out of Chicago.