Application Architecture, Sr. Principal

Blue Shield of California; United States; Hybrid; USD 182,000 - 273,000; Full time

Job summary

Stellarus is seeking a seasoned Senior Principal, Application Architecture, to shape enterprise-scale platform patterns across payer, provider, pharma, and partner workflows. You will set direction for domain-owned services, APIs, event-driven orchestration, and vendor integrations, translating strategy into practical architectures for engineering teams.

This role demands hands-on coding influence, AI-assisted development focus, and strong governance to improve reuse, security, and observability

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent with 4 years of relevant experience.
• 12+ years of software engineering, application architecture, or related technical experience.
• Experience setting architecture direction for enterprise-scale distributed systems.
• Expert knowledge of microservices, API ecosystems, event-driven architecture, and domain-driven design.
• Strong hands-on engineering background comfortable with code, design, and deployment.
• Experience with cloud environments (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP transferable).
• Proven ability to lead complex technical decisions across stakeholders.
• Excellent written communication.
• Healthcare/pharma/regulatory platform experience preferred.

Responsibilities

• Set technical architecture vision for enterprise-scale application platforms that support multiple customers, vendors, product lines, and business workflows.
• Define reusable architecture models for domain-owned services, APIs, event-driven workflows, marketplace capabilities, customer isolation, and vendor integrations.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for build-vs-buy, platform consolidation, modernization, and integration strategy decisions.
• Translate platform strategy into practical architecture patterns that teams can build, test, deploy, operate, and evolve.
• Stay hands-on to review designs, read code, evaluate PRs, reason through incidents, and guide concrete decisions.
• Align senior engineering and product leaders on architecture priorities, risks, standards, tradeoffs, and investments.
• Establish architecture governance and decision frameworks to improve reuse, resiliency, security, interoperability, observability, and production outcomes.
• Establish patterns for data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, and marketplace enablement across the Stellarus platform.
• Advance AI-assisted development practices, architecture documentation, service templates, and reusable guidance.
• Mentor principal engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders to strengthen enterprise-level design judgment.
• Document decisions and create patterns for AI tools and developers to operate efficiently.

Skills

microservices

API ecosystems

event-driven architecture

domain-driven design

TypeScript

Node.js

React

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Azure

OpenAPI

Healthcare industry knowledge

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent with 4 years relevant experience

12+ years of software engineering / architecture

Tools

Azure Kubernetes Service

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Docker

Snowflake

Job description

Your Role

The Stellarus Application Engineering team builds and operates the platform for payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, pharma workflows, internal products, and marketplace capabilities. The Application Architecture, Sr. Principal will report to the Sr. Director, Application Architecture. In this role, you will shape how Stellarus designs reusable services, integrates strategic vendors, applies AI-assisted development patterns, and turns platform strategy into systems that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, and operate.

Job Description

The Stellarus Application Engineering team builds and operates the platform for payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, pharma workflows, internal products, and marketplace capabilities. The Application Architecture, Sr. Principal will report to the Sr. Director, Application Architecture. In this role, you will shape how Stellarus designs reusable services, integrates strategic vendors, applies AI-assisted development patterns, and turns 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 our most senior individual-contributor architecture role. The Senior Principal is the technical authority for application architecture across the platform: someone who sets enterprise-level architecture direction without needing a team to do it, and who is close enough to the code, system design, and production tradeoffs 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 owns the call on what we build, where we integrate with vendors, how those integrations become reusable marketplace capabilities, and how 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 leaders that are energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Responsibilities

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Set technical architecture vision for enterprise-scale application platforms that support multiple customers, vendors, product lines, and business workflows.
• Define reusable architecture models for domain-owned services, APIs, event-driven workflows, marketplace capabilities, customer isolation, and strategic vendor integrations.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for build-vs-buy, platform consolidation, modernization, and integration strategy decisions.
• Translate platform strategy into practical architecture patterns that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, operate, and evolve.
• Stay hands-on enough to review designs, read code, evaluate pull requests when needed, reason through incidents, and help teams make concrete technical decisions.
• Align senior engineering and product leaders on architecture priorities, risks, standards, tradeoffs, and investment decisions.
• Establish architecture governance and decision frameworks that improve reuse, resiliency, security, interoperability, observability, and production outcomes.
• Establish patterns for customer-isolated data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, pharma workflows, partner integrations, and marketplace enablement across the Stellarus platform.
• Advance AI-assisted development practices, architecture documentation, service templates, and reusable engineering guidance that improve delivery efficiency.
• Mentor principal engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders to strengthen enterprise-level design judgment and technical execution.
• Document decisions and create patterns for AI tools and developers to operate efficiently: decision records, reference diagrams, API standards, service templates, AI skills, and architecture review notes.

Qualifications

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or High School Diploma/GED and 4 years of additional relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
• 12+ years of software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical experience.
• Extensive experience setting application architecture direction for enterprise-scale distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, internal platforms, marketplace platforms, or large-scale modernization.
• Expert knowledge of microservices, API ecosystems, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, integration strategy, and platform services.
• Strong hands-on engineering background. You should be comfortable discussing code structure, service design, API contracts, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production failure modes.
• Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment. Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
• Strong understanding of TypeScript, Node.js, APIs, React-based application platforms, containerized workloads, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience with domain-driven design, service decomposition, integration architecture, and the tradeoffs between shared services, product services, and customer-specific extensions.
• Practical experience with build-versus-buy decisions, vendor integration, platform consolidation, marketplace capabilities, or turning repeated integration patterns into reusable platform services.
• Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, event contracts, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant/customer isolation, and auditability.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical decision-making across engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and executive stakeholders without relying on generic architecture theater.
• Demonstrated ability to create architecture standards, decision frameworks, and reusable patterns that influence engineering execution without formal management authority.
• Experience mentoring staff and principal-level engineers and architects.
• 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 experience.
• Excellent written communication. You can make architecture decisions clear, concise, and useful to the teams who need to execute them.

Preferred Knowledge And Experience

Stellarus is building primarily with:

• TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, React, Next.js, Python
• PostgreSQL, Azure Blob Storage, Snowflake
• Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure API Management, Azure Service Bus
• Dapr for service invocation and pub/sub
• Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Docker
• Auth0, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, API key support for integrations
• Nx monorepo, API contract-first development, automated testing

For this role, we especially value experience with:

• Designing enterprise marketplace platforms, multi-tenant systems, customer-isolated data boundaries, or partner integrations
• Regulated platform capabilities in healthcare, payer, or pharma environments
• Enterprise architecture paired with hands-on application architecture and delivery execution

Hybrid

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.

About Us

About Stellarus and the Ascendiun Family of Companies

Stellarus, launched in January 2025, is designed to scale innovative healthcare solutions that support customers in creating a health care experience deserving of their family, friends, and neighbors.

Stellarus is part of a family of organizations that is overseen by a nonprofit corporate entity named Ascendiun. The Ascendiun Family of Companies also includes Blue Shield of California and its subsidiary, Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan and Altais, a clinical services company.

Stellarus’ vision is to empower its customers to create a healthcare experience that is worthy of their family, friends, and neighbors. Stellarus’ objective is offer innovative, modern, scalable solutions that challenge the health care status quo. This very closely aligns with Blue Shield of California’s vision by using innovation to improve quality, affordability, and experience for members.

To achieve our mission, we foster an environment where all employees can thrive and contribute fully to address the needs of the various communities we serve. We are committed to creating and maintaining a supportive workplace that upholds our values and advances our goals.

Our Values:

At Stellarus, our core values of agility, trust, drive, courage and service shape our approach to developing innovative product offerings.

Our Workplace Model:

We believe in fostering a workplace environment that balances purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility - providing clear expectations while respecting the diverse needs of our workforce. Our workplace model is designed around intentional in-person interaction, collaboration, connection, creativity and flexibility:

• For most teams, this means coming into the office two days per week.
• Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location, out of state employees, and employees in certain member-facing roles should work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.
• For employees with medical conditions that may impact their ability to work in-office, we are committed to engaging in an interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to ensure their work environment is conducive to their success and well-being.

The Company reserves the right to require more presence in the office based on business needs, and requirements are subject to change with periodic reviews.

Physical Requirements:

Office Environment - roles involving part to full time schedule in Office Environment. Based in our physical offices and work from home office/deskwork - Activity level: Sedentary, frequency most of work day.

Please click here for further physical requirement detail.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

External hires must pass a background check/drug screen. Qualified applicants with arrest records and/or conviction records will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with Federal, State and local laws, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, protected veteran status or disability status and any other classification protected by Federal, State and local laws.

JOB INFO

Job Identification : 20261614

Job Category : Information Technology

Posting Date : 2026-08-25T22:39:00+00:00

Job Schedule : Full time

Locations :

Oakland, CA, United States

WA, United States

OH, United States

DC, United States

CA, United States

Long Beach, CA, United States

AZ, United States

CO, United States

CT, United States

FL, United States

GA, United States

MD, United States

MN, United States

NV, United States

OR, United States

El Dorado Hills, CA, United States

San Diego, CA, United States

Woodland Hills, CA, United States

AL, United States

IL, United States

VA, United States

WI, United States

TX, United States

NY, United States

Pay Range for California : $181830.00 to $272800.00

Pay Range for Bay Area : $204972.00 to $307520.00

Note : Please note that this range represents the pay range for this and many other positions at Blue Shield that fall into this pay grade. Blue Shield salaries are based on a variety of factors, including the candidate experience, location (California, Bay Area, or outside California), and current employee salaries for similar roles.

Role can be filled by a candidate requiring sponsorship : No