Principal Platform Architect

Principal Platform Architecture

Role Overview

This senior technical role shapes the direction of the organization’s core platform ecosystem, spanning infrastructure, cloud environments, networking, compute, storage, and observability. The Principal Platform Architect acts as the strategic and hands‑on expert responsible for defining how foundational platform capabilities are designed, deployed, and evolved across both modern and legacy systems.

You will guide architectural standards, lead proof‑of‑concept initiatives, influence engineering practices across the enterprise, and ensure the platform remains resilient, scalable, and aligned with the needs of high‑performance applications.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture Leadership

• Define the architectural vision for container orchestration, streaming platforms, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and observability frameworks.
• Develop target-state architectures and create clear transition paths from existing environments.
• Maintain reference architectures for Kubernetes workloads, distributed streaming systems, stream‑processing frameworks, and cloud infrastructure patterns.
• Establish platform standards and guardrails that application teams can reliably build upon.
• Ensure platform-level support for critical non-functional requirements such as availability, latency, throughput, and recoverability.

Modernization & Cloud Transformation

• Lead the migration of workloads toward cloud‑native patterns, including compute, networking, storage, and security services.
• Define and mature GitOps practices, including infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and lead hands‑on validation efforts before adoption.
• Identify platform risks and drive remediation of architectural weaknesses, capacity constraints, and operational gaps.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with application architects to ensure platform capabilities align with demanding performance and reliability requirements.
• Partner with engineering and operations teams to ensure designs are practical, maintainable, and operationally sound.
• Facilitate architecture discussions with technical leaders and business stakeholders, translating complex decisions into clear, actionable guidance.

Resilience & Operational Excellence

• Define observability standards for logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting as core platform capabilities.
• Establish performance engineering and capacity‑planning practices for platform components.
• Participate in incident reviews and convert operational learnings into long‑term architectural improvements.
• Ensure platform designs support regulatory, compliance, or resilience expectations relevant to the organization’s industry.

Qualifications

• 10 years in platform, infrastructure, or systems architecture roles with enterprise‑scale impact.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operations.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating Apache Kafka or similar distributed streaming platforms.
• Practical experience with stream‑processing frameworks such as Apache Flink.
• Strong background in cloud architecture (e.g., VPC design, compute services, managed Kubernetes, storage, identity, and security).
• Demonstrated experience implementing GitOps pipelines using tools such as ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform, or Helm.
• Experience working across both legacy and cloud‑native environments.
• Ability to produce clear architectural documentation, including diagrams, reference architectures, and decision records.
• Strong communication skills, capable of engaging both executive and engineering audiences.

Technical Skills

• Kubernetes (managed or self‑hosted), Kafka, stream‑processing frameworks
• Cloud services: compute, networking, storage, identity, security
• GitOps tooling: ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform, Helm
• CI/CD: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk
• Linux environments, containerization, and image management

Compensation

• $200-240k base
• 30% annual bonus
• 25 days PTO
• 6% 401k matching
• Health, vision, dental and life plans

This is a hybrid role, based out of Chicago.