Principal Software Architect

Engg; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Abacus Insights is scaling fast—creating a Principal Software Architect role to set the technical vision for our healthcare data platform and drive architectural standards across data, applications, cloud, and agent-driven development.

You will translate business needs into target-state architectures, mentor engineers and Solution Architects, and partner with security, AI, and product teams to deliver secure, scalable, and compliant solutions.

Qualifications

• Senior architect with proven track record designing data platforms.
• Ability to translate business and customer needs into target-state architectures.
• Experience mentoring engineers and solution architects across teams.
• Familiar with HITRUST and GovRamp compliance considerations.
• Knowledge of AWS/Azure multi-tenant SaaS architecture and data security patterns.

Responsibilities

• Own the reference architecture for Abacus's core platform spanning data ingestion, transformation, distribution, and serving.
• Set and enforce architecture standards for scalability, high availability, and security across cloud environments.
• Guide architecture for compliance alignment with Security and Compliance from the outset.
• Design scalable payer data solutions and apply healthcare data standards where relevant.
• Establish data contracts, lineage, and integration patterns across layers.

Skills

Architecture leadership

Senior engineer

Mentoring

Architectural governance

Tools

AWS

Azure

FHIR

Job description

About Us

Abacus Insights is transforming how data works for health plans. Our mission is simple: make healthcare data usable, so the people responsible for care and cost decisions can act faster, with confidence. We help health plans break down data silos to create a single, trusted data foundation. That foundation powers better decisions—so plans can improve outcomes, reduce waste, and deliver better experiences for members and providers alike. Backed by $100M from top investors, we’re tackling big challenges in an industry that’s ready for change. Our platform enables GenAI use cases by delivering clean, connected, and reliable healthcare data to support automation, prioritization, and decision workflows—and it’s why we are leading the way. Our innovation begins with people. We are bold, curious, and collaborative—because the best ideas come from working together. We embrace the thoughtful use of AI and automation to drive innovation and efficiency, and we look for individuals who are curious and adaptable—those excited to leverage emerging technologies to enhance how we work—while keeping human insight, connection, and our clients at the center of every decision. Ready to make an impact? Join us and let’s build the future together.

About the Role

Abacus is scaling fast – more Data Solutions applications, more agent-assisted engineering, more complexity worth getting right. We're creating this role to put a single, senior technical voice at the center of that growth: someone who can take sharp architectural judgment and turn it into standards the whole organization can build on with confidence. We're looking for an experienced Principal Software Architect to set the technical vision for how Abacus builds, secures, and scales its healthcare data platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a management track – you'll be the architecture guru and evangelist for our platform, translating business and customer needs into target-state architectures across data, applications, cloud, and agent-assisted engineering, and mentoring engineers and Solution Architects as you go. You'll build the reusable application foundation – design system, application blueprints, integration contracts, and production-readiness gates – that lets Data Solutions applications move fast without reinventing the wheel every time. And as agent-driven development becomes a bigger part of how we ship, you'll be the one turning architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that let AI-assisted output meet the same bar as our best human-written code – putting you at the center of how Abacus builds software for years to come. You'll bring enough depth to guide decisions across data, application, integration, cloud, and agentic development, while staying pragmatic about fit-for-purpose architecture and delivery constraints. You won't do it alone – you'll partner closely with Product Engineering, our Principal Engineering team, AI Engineering, Security, and Client Solutions, bringing architecture to life from concept through production, not just on a whiteboard.

Your day to day

Core architecture leadership

Own and evolve the reference architecture for Abacus's core platform – data ingestion, transformation, distribution, and serving – partnering with Principal Engineering where ingestion and distribution ownership is shared, and with Product Engineering on application and service layers. Set and enforce architecture standards for scaling, high availability/disaster recovery design, serverless patterns, and multi-tenant SaaS architecture across our AWS and Azure environments. Guide architecture for HITRUST and GovRamp compliance alignment, partnering with Security and Compliance so designs meet audit and control expectations from the outset rather than as an afterthought. Healthcare data and platform architecture Design scalable architectures for payer data solutions spanning claims, membership, provider, clinical, lab, and pharmacy/Rx domains, and their analytical and operational serving layers. Apply FHIR-based interoperability patterns and healthcare data standards where relevant to product or client implementations. Establish data contracts, lineage, quality controls, metadata, and integration patterns across ingestion, transformation, and serving layers, in coordination with Data Engineering.

Application architecture and user experience foundation

Own the design system and front-end/UX standards for Data Solutions applications, partnering with UX/Design on accessibility, branding, and consistent interaction patterns. Define standard user-management capabilities – tenant setup, roles, permissions, and admin experiences – as reusable patterns instead of something each team reinvents.

Agent-driven development and AI-enabled engineering

Translate approved architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that our ADD Harness and agent-assisted development workflows can consume directly. Evaluate agent-generated code and designs against architectural gold standards, and build the scoring and review mechanisms that let us scale the quality of agent-produced merge requests across engineering teams. Partner with AI Engineering on semantic/context layers, agent interfaces (MCP and A2A), retrieval patterns, AI gateways, evaluation, traceability, and governed model access.

Architecture governance, mentoring, and influence

Be an active senior member and contributor to Abacus's Architecture and Data Guilds – introducing ideas, taking them to realization, and helping drive a culture of innovation through hackathons and beyond. Mentor engineers and Solution Architects through pairing on designs, reviews, and pilots, growing architectural capability across the team rather than concentrating it in one person. Establish lightweight architecture review mechanisms that protect critical standards without slowing delivery, measuring adoption through signals like reuse, ex