Principal Application Architect – Platform & Microservices

Blue Shield of CA; Redding (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Shield of California seeks a Principal, Application Architecture to drive architecture decisions for core platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives. You will lead, influence senior stakeholders, and remain close to code, system design, and production tradeoffs to ensure credible technical direction across payer and health platform domains.

You will guide architecture for distributed systems, microservices, and cloud platforms, balancing buy/build decisions and vendor integrations

Qualifications

• 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 guiding 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.
• Healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated‑industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security‑sensitive platform experience preferred.
• Enterprise architecture experience is a plus when paired with hands‑on delivery execution and coding

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives.
• Own architecture direction and resolve high-impact risks and cross-team design conflicts.
• Drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions for platform capabilities.
• Translate platform strategy into actionable direction for engineers and delivery teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native platforms

Microservices

API design

Data modeling

OpenAPI

PostgreSQL

Event-driven systems

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

Job description

Blue Shield of California seeks a Principal, Application Architecture to drive architecture decisions for core platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives. You will lead, influence senior stakeholders, and remain close to code, system design, and production tradeoffs to ensure credible technical direction across payer and health platform domains.

You will guide architecture for distributed systems, microservices, and cloud platforms, balancing buy/build decisions and vendor integrations