Principal Solutions Architect - Device Setup & Connectivity

NRG Energy; Washington; Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free daily lunch

Holidays & paid time off

Employee Discounts

Onsite health clinic

401(k) + Employer Match

Employee Resource Groups

Quarterly Innovation Weeks

Job summary

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG Energy owned company, is hiring a Principal Solutions Architect to own the holistic technical view of how devices are set up and stay connected. You will influence across hardware, embedded, cloud, and mobile engineering, partnering with product, design, QA, data, and field ops to drive architecture changes that reduce install time and improve reliability.

You will lead evaluations, integrate third-party services, and define telemetry and self-healing strategies while

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or systems engineering, including significant time as an architect or technical lead on distributed systems that include physical devices.
• Deep understanding of connected device architecture, including provisioning, cloud-to-device connectivity, OTA updates, and fleet telemetry at scale.
• Experience evaluating, selecting, and integrating third-party platforms and services, and owning vendor relationships through to production.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the holistic architectural picture of setup and device connectivity across panel firmware, cloud, mobile apps, and radios.
• Lead build-versus-buy evaluations for third‑party services and own integration into platform, data model, and security posture.
• Define architecture for device health telemetry and self-healing to report connectivity health and recover from common home network events.
• Work with device makers, ODMs, and silicon partners to ensure commissioning and telemetry hooks integrate with the product ecosystem.
• Write architecture evaluations, reference designs, and decision records to guide tradeoffs across protocols, performance, and recovery.
• Diagnose real-world failure patterns using field data and telemetry, turning insights into prioritized architectural work.
• Advise product leadership on roadmap and strategy, including protocol strategy by device category.

Skills

Distributed systems

Device architecture

Networking

Vendor evaluation

Influence without authority

Technical writing

Analytical rigor

Cross-functional leadership

Job description

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG Energy owned company, is hiring a Principal Solutions Architect to own the holistic technical view of how devices are set up and stay connected. You will influence across hardware, embedded, cloud, and mobile engineering, partnering with product, design, QA, data, and field ops to drive architecture changes that reduce install time and improve reliability.

You will lead evaluations, integrate third-party services, and define telemetry and self-healing strategies while