Principal Architect, Platform Architecture

McKesson Corporation; Columbus (OH); On-site; USD 163,000 - 271,000; Full time

Job summary

McKesson Corporation is seeking a Principal Architect to lead architectural direction for core platform domains and to serve as the embedded architectural partner on high-profile initiatives. You will shape platform standards, drive adoption through the ARB, and translate gaps into platform capabilities across value streams.

The role emphasizes early engagement, architectural governance, and mentorship of architects and engineers to sustain platform coherence at scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 13+ years of software and platform engineering experience with architectural scope.
• 8+ years in principal-level or senior individual contributor roles.

Responsibilities

• Own architectural direction for core platform domains across the organization.
• Develop and ratify architectural standards through ARB and governance structures.
• Surface gaps between platform capabilities and project requirements early and translate into platform capabilities.

Skills

Architectural leadership

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD platform design

Developer experience tooling

Security & compliance architecture

API & service design

Influencing without authority

Architecture governance

Communication skills

Open source contributions

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

IDP design patterns

Job description

McKesson is an impact-driven, Fortune 10 company that touches virtually every aspect of healthcare. We are known for delivering insights, products, and services that make quality care more accessible and affordable. Here, we focus on the health, happiness, and well-being of you and those we serve - we care.

What you do at McKesson matters. We foster a culture where you can grow, make an impact, and are empowered to bring new ideas. Together, we thrive as we shape the future of health for patients, our communities, and our people. If you want to be part of tomorrow's health today, we want to hear from you.

CMM's Platform Architecture team operates at a distinctive intersection: it shapes the engineering platform that serves every engineering team at CMM, while simultaneously embedding in the organization's highest-priority, most technically complex initiatives to ensure those projects build on the platform as intended - and to bring what they surface back as first-class platform capabilities. The Principal Architect is the most senior individual contributor on this team, and that dual mandate is the core of the role.

This is a role for an architect who earns organizational influence through the quality of their thinking and the credibility of their recommendations. You will own architectural direction for key platform domains, develop and ratify organizational standards through the CMM Architecture Review Board, and serve as the embedded architectural partner on high-profile initiatives across value stream engineering. When your embedded work reveals a gap between what the platform offers and what teams need, you don't hand it off - you translate it into a platform capability and drive it through.

This is not a review role that appears late and comments on completed designs. The value is being present early, trusted deeply, and able to change outcomes - on individual projects and on the platform that underlies all of them. This role reports to the Sr. Director of Platform Architecture.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Standards

• Own architectural direction for CMM's core platform domains, shaping platform investment decisions and establishing the technical standards that guide engineering teams across the organization.

• Develop and ratify CMM architectural standards through the ARB - researching problems, building options and rationale, and shepherding proposals through to adoption.

• Build and maintain reference architectures and reusable patterns that give engineering teams a trusted framework for common problems.

• Identify architectural debt, structural risks, and emerging gaps - and propose platform investments to address them before they become constraints or workarounds.

• Maintain and socialize a technology radar across CMM's platform domains - a structured investment signal for what the organization should adopt, trial, assess, or avoid - and use it to inform multi-year platform architectural direction.

Embedded Value Stream Partnership

• Serve as the embedded architectural partner on high-profile initiatives - present early enough to shape decisions, not late enough to create blockers.

• Ensure new workloads are built using the platform as intended - applying established standards and avoiding workarounds that accumulate integration debt.

• Surface gaps between platform capabilities and project requirements early, translating them into platform capability proposals rather than project-scoped solutions.

• Stay close enough to the platform itself to identify when behavior diverges from intent and bring those findings back to the team.

Technical Mentorship & Engineering Capability

• Invest in the architectural capability of the broader engineering organization through design reviews, architecture guilds, and documentation.

• Help develop architects and senior engineers who think at platform-wide scope - building the organizational capacity to sustain architectural coherence at scale.

• Model the technical thinking that prevents re-platforming: long-horizon awareness, trade-off transparency, and the discipline to surface risks early.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Build credibility with engineering leaders across CMM through the quality of thinking and the track record of decisions made better by this role's involvement.

• Serve as a technical thought partner to value stream engineering leaders on decisions with platform-wide implications, helping teams make choices that are locally sound and globally coherent.

• Communicate architectural direction in ways that enable rather than constrain - clear frameworks, documented patterns, and governance processes lightweight enough to be respected.

We are unable to offer or provide sponsorship for this role presently or in the future.

Minimum Requirements

Degree or equivalent and typically requires 13+ years of relevant experience, including at least 8 years of direct software and platform architecture work, and significant time in principal-level or senior individual contributor roles with cross-system architectural scope.

Critical Skills

• 13+ years of software and platform engineering experience, with at least 8 years in senior individual contributor roles where architectural responsibility spanned multiple systems or teams.

• Retains meaningful technical depth - able to prototype in critical platform areas, conduct rigorous code and architecture reviews, and go deep on technical problems when the team needs it.

• Demonstrated ability to set and steward architectural direction for complex, cloud-native platforms - with evidence that standards and decisions reduced rather than created technical debt over time.

• Deep expertise in at least two platform domains: cloud infrastructure architecture, CI/CD and delivery platform design, developer experience tooling, security and compliance architecture, or API and service design patterns.

• Breadth to engage credibly across the full platform stack - from infrastructure and deployment through to application architecture, integration patterns, and developer experience.

• Proven ability to influence technical direction without organizational authority, with examples of changing engineering decisions in ways that demonstrably improved outcomes.

• Experience developing and ratifying architectural standards in an architecture governance context (ARB, TAB, or equivalent).

• Strong written and verbal communication skills - able to produce architectural documentation and recommendations that are clear, accessible, and actually used by engineering teams.

• Recognized within the broader software engineering community - through open source contributions, technical publications, conference participation, or active engagement in platform engineering or developer experience communities.

Additional Skills

• Experience in healthcare technology or regulated data environments where compliance requirements shape architectural choices at the platform level.

• Familiarity with Internal Developer Platform (IDP) design patterns and self-service developer workflow automation.

• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure patterns and the platform architectural requirements for AI-enabled tooling and inference-ready service design.

• Experience operating in a federated engineering organization where platform architecture must influence without mandating.

• Demonstrated ability to build architectural credibility across a distributed engineering organization through quality of thinking and trust built over time.

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience. Graduate degree or recognized technical contributions (patents, publications, open-source projects, conference presentations) in relevant domains are valued.

We are proud to offer a competitive compensation package at McKesson as part of our Total Rewards. This is determined by several factors, including performance, experience and skills, equity, regular job market evaluations, and geographical markets. The pay range shown below is aligned with McKesson's pay philosophy, and pay will always be compliant with any applicable regulations. In addition to base pay, other compensation, such as an annual bonus or long-term incentive opportunities may be offered. For more information regarding benefits at McKesson, pleaseclick here.

Our Base Pay Range for this position

$162,800 - $271,300

McKesson is an Equal Opportunity Employer

McKesson provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, age, genetic information, or any other legally protected category. For additional information on McKesson's full Equal Employment Opportunity policies, visit our Equal Employment Opportunity page.

McKesson is committed to being an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and offers opportunities to all job seekers including job seekers with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, please contact us by sending an email to (United States) [e-mail] or (Canada) [e-mail]. Resumes or CVs submitted to this email box will not be accepted.

Join us at McKesson!