Principal Architect at Applaudo

About the Role: Principal Architect

Applaudo is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Architect with profound expertise in Domain Driven Design (DDD), event driven architecture, and API governance. This is a hands on architecture position, not a delivery, program, or project management role. We are looking for an individual who has successfully built enterprise scale integration platforms, focusing on standardizing how business domains communicate across various systems and verticals. You will be responsible for end to end decision making, proactive communication of blockers, and influencing engineering culture across multiple teams. The ideal candidate is comfortable collaborating with business stakeholders to whiteboard domain models and reviewing pull requests with engineers. A passion for AI adoption is essential, with daily practical use of tools like Copilot, RAG, or agentic workflows to enhance development speed and quality. This position is offered under a contractor model.

Key Competencies and Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience:
  • 10+ years in Software Engineering.
  • 5+ years in Architecture, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Technical Leadership roles with active, current hands on coding.
• Proven Expertise: Designing and implementing enterprise scale integration platforms and distributed systems. A core value is building a unified enterprise integration layer to standardize communication across business domains, systems, and verticals.
• Technical Skills:
  • Strong expertise in modern .NET patterns, async pipelines, and enterprise scale codebases. Comparable depth in an equivalent stack (e.g., Java) is acceptable.
  • API Architecture and Enterprise Integrations, including API governance at scale.
  • Domain Driven Design (DDD).
  • Event Driven Architecture (EDA).
  • Test Driven Development (TDD).
  • Microservices and Distributed Systems.
  • Cloud Native Architecture.
  • Hands on experience with enterprise messaging/event platforms (e.g., Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, RabbitMQ, Solace, Apache Kafka, or AWS SQS). Azure is highly desired but equivalent depth with any platform is acceptable.
  • Strong understanding of REST APIs, OpenAPI Specifications, OAuth2, OIDC, API Security, and Identity Management.
  • Experience implementing observability practices: monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, and telemetry.
  • Daily, hands on use of AI tools in engineering workflows (Copilot, RAG based tools, agentic coding assistants).
  • Knowledge of CQRS, Event Sourcing, Saga Patterns, and Distributed Transaction Management.
  • Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and enterprise observability platforms.
• Communication & Ownership: Strong communication skills with fluency sufficient to work directly with a US based team and stakeholders. You will be expected to own and clearly present specific architectural areas in stakeholder discussions. Demonstrated ownership and accountability, including surfacing risks early, removing blockers, and driving outcomes autonomously.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Architect, you will be accountable for:

• Designing and leading the implementation of a unified enterprise integration layer to enable canonical business domains, flexible source system extensions, and seamless cross vertical connectivity.
• Defining and maintaining application architecture standards, principles, and best practices across the integration and API engineering organization.
• Designing scalable, secure, and highly available API ecosystems and integration solutions.
• Leading architecture reviews and providing hands on technical guidance across engineering teams.
• Defining standards for API design, security, observability, documentation, and lifecycle management.
• Leading integration strategies across internal applications, ERP, SaaS platforms, enterprise systems, and external partners.
• Facilitating domain discovery and event storming workshops with business and technical stakeholders.
• Designing and implementing event driven and message based architectures using technologies like Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs.
• Driving the adoption of AI assisted engineering practices to improve developer productivity, delivery speed, and solution quality.
• Promoting engineering excellence through TDD, Clean Architecture, SOLID principles, and automated quality practices.
• Leading modernization initiatives and technical debt reduction efforts.
• Partnering with platform teams on CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and developer experience.
• Mentoring architects, technical leads, and engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning.
• Serving as a trusted advisor for strategic technology investments and modernization initiatives.