Principal Platform Architect (AI, Microservices, Cloud)

Blue Shield of California

California (MO)

On-site

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Stellarus Technology seeks a Principal, Application Architecture to lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, translating strategy into actionable systems for engineering teams.

The role involves driving build-vs-buy decisions, modernizing platform components, and guiding AI-enabled tooling while mentoring senior engineers and maintaining strong collaboration with security, product, and operations teams.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or 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 preferred; AWS/GCP transferable).
Strong API and data architecture judgment including REST, OpenAPI, PostgreSQL, and tenant isolation.
Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
Healthcare/payor/security-sensitive platform experience is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Define application architecture direction for major platform capabilities, reusable services, and cross-domain technical initiatives.
Lead architecture decisions for service decomposition, API ecosystems, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, and marketplace capabilities.
Partner with senior engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and business stakeholders to align architecture with platform strategy.
Drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions to improve speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
Stay hands-on to review designs, read code, evaluate pull requests, and reason through incidents.
Establish architecture standards and review practices that improve design quality and operational ownership.
Resolve high-impact risks, cross-team dependencies, design conflicts, and complex platform tradeoffs.
Create reusable architecture frameworks, decision models, and AI-enabled guidance for engineering consistency.
Establish patterns for data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, and partner integrations.
Mentor senior engineers and technical leads to raise the quality of technical judgment and execution.
Document decisions and create patterns for AI tools and developers to operate efficiently.