Principal Architect

Job Description

Role Overview

We are looking for a Principal Architect with 12+ years of experience who will own and drive the end-to-end architecture of large-scale, distributed systems. This role deeply focuses on system architecture, technical strategy, and long-term platform evolution. As a Principal Architect, you will work closely with engineering leadership, product, and business stakeholders to define architectural vision, ensure technical excellence, and enable teams to build scalable, resilient, and future-ready systems.

Key Responsibilities
Own the overall system architecture across multiple domains, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
Define and drive long-term architectural vision and technical roadmap aligned with business goals.
Design and review high-level system designs, data flows, integration patterns, and technology choices.
Act as a technical authority for complex architectural decisions, trade-offs, and design reviews.
Partner with Principal Engineers,Engineering Managers, and Product Managers to translate business requirements into robust architectural solutions.
Establish and evolve architecture standards, design principles, and best practices across teams.
Identify architectural risks and proactively drive mitigation strategies.
Enable teams by providing hands-on guidance, reference architectures, and design frameworks (not day-to-day coding ownership).
Drive adoption of modern architectures including microservices, event-driven systems, cloud-native patterns, and data platforms.
Evaluate emerging technologies and tools, and guide adoption where they create long-term value.
Support scale-related initiatives such as performance optimization, system resiliency, cost optimization, and platform modernization.
Play a key role in technical leadership forums, architecture councils, and senior technical reviews.
Contribute to hiring, mentoring senior engineers, and shaping the overall engineering culture.

Required Qualifications
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
12+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant focus on system architecture and design.
Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale, distributed, cloud-based systems. Deep understanding of: Distributed systems, scalability, and fault tolerance. Microservices and event-driven architectures API design, data modelling, and integration patterns.
Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across multiple teams.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex architectural concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications
Experience working in data-intensive, AI/ML, or big-data platforms.
Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and cloud cost optimization.
Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Prior experience in a Principal Architect, Staff Architect, or equivalent technical leadership role.
Experience working in fast-scaling SaaS or enterprise platforms.

What Success Looks Like in This Role
Clear, scalable architecture that supports rapid product growth.
Strong alignment between engineering execution and architectural vision.
Reduced technical debt and improved system reliability over time.
Engineering teams enabled to move faster with confidence through well-defined architectural guardrails.

Our Benefits:

Full-time employees can take advantage of health coverage, paid parental leave, generous paid time-off and holidays, quarterly self-care days off, and stock options. We’ll make sure you have the equipment and support you need to work and connect with your teams, at home or in one of our offices.

We have a growth mindset culture that is represented in all that we do, from onboarding through to numerous learning and development initiatives including access to our LinkedIn Learning platform. Employee well-being is also top of mind for us. We host quarterly wellness education sessions to encourage self care and personal growth. From wellness days to ERG-hosted events, we celebrate and energize all 6sense employees and their backgrounds.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

6sense is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employers. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. If you require reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please direct your inquiries to jobs@6sense.com.

We are aware of recruiting impersonation attempts that are not affiliated with 6sense in any way. All email communications from 6sense will originate from the @6sense.com domain. We will not initially contact you via text message and will never request payments. If you are uncertain whether you have been contacted by an official 6sense employee, reach out to jobs@6sense.com