Principal Architect - Microservices Architecture

Job Description :

We're looking for a Principal Architect to own the architecture, design consistency, and technical direction across all of GoComet's products. You will set the architectural foundation for a scalable, secure, and extensible multi-product SaaS platform that serves Fortune 500 clients like Unilever, Apple, and Koch. This role is hands-on, governance-heavy, and product-agnostic. You'll drive system-level architecture decisions, enforce cross-product standards, and protect the long-term technical health of the platform, even when it's uncomfortable.

Responsibilities :

- Define and maintain architecture strategy, design standards, and tech stack governance across all GoComet products.

- Review and approve all cross-product or infra-impacting architectural decisions; no critical change goes through without your sign-off.

- Ensure alignment with scalability, modularity, performance, and infosec best practices across

the board.

- Collaborate with product, engineering, SRE, and delivery teams to assess technical proposals and solution designs.

- Challenge unnecessary customization, short-term hacks, or product debt to protect the architecture, even if it means saying no.

- Define reusable architectural patterns, reference implementations, and internal RFC processes.

- Guide teams on system-level trade-offs : performance vs flexibility, modularity vs speed, security vs effort.

- A mentor with empathy focuses on teaching, guiding, and uplifting the team by providing architectural mentorship.

- Avoid rudeness or gatekeeping; lead by nurturing curiosity and growth.

- Serve as a bridge between infrastructure, core product teams, and delivery, ensuring long-term coherence without blocking velocity.

- Participate in design reviews, incident postmortems, and CI/CD architectural improvements.

- Provide architectural mentorship to engineers and ensure ongoing skill development.

Requirements :

- 5+ years of backend architecture, platform engineering, or infrastructure design in fast-scaling SaaS environments.

- Proven experience leading architectural strategy across multiple products or domains.

- Deep knowledge of system design, APIs, cloud-native architecture, data modeling, auth/security protocols, and performance optimization.

- Ability to evaluate and evolve system design with clarity : monolith vs microservices, database sharding, multi-region deployment, etc.

- 3+ years in a cross-functional technical leadership role (product + engineering + infra + delivery).

- Familiarity with multi-tenant SaaS models, on-prem deployments, and secure enterprise environments (SOC2 ISO, GDPR).

- Experience building and enforcing architecture review processes, design guidelines, and internal frameworks.

- Excellent communication skills capable of challenging opinions, defending choices, and aligning diverse stakeholders.

- Loves to teach, guide, and mentor engineers, not just review their work, but help them grow. Leads with empathy, not ego.