Application Architecture, Principal

Blue Shield of CA; Virginia Beach (VA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Shield of CA—Stellarus Technology team seeks a Principal, Application Architecture to guide architecture direction for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives. You will translate strategy into design tangible for engineering teams and drive modernization efforts.

This senior IC role emphasizes hands-on design, API contracts, and production tradeoffs in cloud environments, with strong emphasis on payer, provider, pharma, and partner workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent with 4+ years of relevant experience.
• 10+ years in software engineering, application architecture, or platform engineering.
• Experience leading architecture for distributed systems and cloud-native platforms.
• Deep knowledge of domain-driven design and service decomposition.
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate strategy into execution.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives.
• Drive build-vs-buy and modernization decisions for platform components.
• mentor senior engineers, architects, and tech leads.
• Collaborate with product, security, and operations to ensure scalable designs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native platforms

Microservices

Event-driven architectures

API design

Stakeholder influence

Education

Bachelor's degree

High School Diploma/GED

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

PostgreSQL

OpenAPI

Job description

Your Role

The Stellarus Technology team builds and operates the platform for payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, pharma workflows, internal products, and marketplace capabilities. The Principal, Application Architecture will report to the Senior Director, Application Architecture. In this role, you will lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, and turn platform strategy into systems that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, and operate.

The platform is built around domain-owned microservices, reusable APIs, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, and a marketplace of capabilities that can be composed across customers and product lines.

This is a senior individual-contributor architecture role. You will own architecture direction for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, resolve high-impact technical risks and cross-team design conflicts, and stay close enough to the code and system design to make that direction credible to engineers. This role has overlap with enterprise architecture, and a background in enterprise architecture is a plus, but the work is closer to the code, system design, engineering execution, AI development improvements, vendor integration, and production tradeoffs than to enterprise architecture theater.

Stellarus generally takes a build-over-buy approach when the capability is core to our platform. This role will drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions for the platform capabilities it owns, and help teams design products for payer, provider, pharma, and partner workflows.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow - personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for people who are energized by creative and critical thinking, raising the technical bar across teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or High School Diploma/GED and 4 years of additional relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
• 10+ years of software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical experience.
• Experience leading application architecture for distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices, internal platforms, or modernization initiatives.
• Strong hands‑on engineering background with the ability to guide service design, API contracts, code structure, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production tradeoffs.
• Deep experience with domain-driven design, service decomposition, integration architecture, shared services, customer extensions, and reusable platform patterns.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate platform strategy into clear architecture direction and execution standards.
• Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment. Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
• Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, event contracts, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant/customer isolation, and auditability.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
• Healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated‑industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security‑sensitive platform experience is strongly preferred.
• Enterprise architecture experience is a plus, especially when paired with hands‑on application architecture and delivery execution.
• Excellent written communication. You can make architecture decisions clear, concise, and useful to the teams who need to execute them.