Job Description:

Looking for a Principal Architect Digital Commerce to define the strategy, architecture, and evolution of its digital commerce discovery platforms across Browse, Search, CMS, and Product Catalog.

Reporting to the Distinguished Architect, this role will provide enterprise-level architectural direction across digital commerce capabilities, driving cloud-native modernization, event-driven integration, scalability, resilience, performance, and technical excellence.

The ideal candidate will combine deep architecture expertise with strong business understanding and the ability to influence engineering teams and senior stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

- Define and evolve the architecture for Browse, Search, CMS, and Product Catalog capabilities in alignment with business objectives and customer-experience goals.

- Lead current-state assessments, target-state architecture, modernization strategies, migration planning, and technology roadmaps across digital commerce platforms.

- Architect scalable, secure, resilient, and high-performance solutions using cloud-native, API-first, microservices, and event-driven architectures.

- Design and evolve enterprise Search architecture, including indexing, relevance, autocomplete, faceting, filtering, ranking, search APIs, and high-volume query processing.

- Define Product Catalog architecture covering products, SKUs, categories, attributes, variants, ingestion, synchronization, data quality, and downstream data propagation.

- Design CMS integration and content-delivery architectures, including headless APIs, content models, publishing workflows, caching, CDN, and integration with Browse experiences.

- Define Browse architecture covering category navigation, facets, filters, sorting, pagination, merchandising, API/BFF aggregation, caching, and graceful degradation.

- Lead event-driven integration and data synchronization using Kafka or equivalent streaming technologies across catalog, search, content, and platform services.

- Establish architecture standards and reusable patterns for APIs, events, data, integration, security, observability, and performance.

- Evaluate technology options, architectural trade-offs, and platform capabilities and recommend solutions based on scalability, maintainability, cost, security, and business value.

- Work closely with Distinguished Architects, Engineering, Product, UX, Data, DevOps, Security, and business teams to translate strategic requirements into actionable architecture.

- Provide technical direction during architecture reviews, design reviews, modernization initiatives, and complex engineering decisions.

- Mentor senior engineers and architects and promote strong engineering and architecture practices across teams.

- Drive non-functional requirements covering availability, resiliency, latency, scalability, security, observability, and disaster recovery.

- Identify and address architectural risks, technical debt, system bottlenecks, and platform dependencies.

- Support production engineering teams in resolving critical architectural and performance issues and ensure sustainable corrective actions.

- Define and monitor architecture-related standards and ensure implementation consistency across digital commerce platforms.

- Stay current with developments in digital commerce architecture, search technology, content platforms, cloud-native engineering, event streaming, and modern API ecosystems.

Required Skills & Experience:

- 15 - 20 years of experience in software architecture, enterprise architecture, or large-scale digital engineering.

- Proven experience as a Principal Architect, Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect, or equivalent senior architecture role.

- Strong experience designing and modernizing digital commerce or customer-facing enterprise platforms.

- Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, microservices, API-first design, and event-driven architectures.

- Strong understanding of digital commerce discovery capabilities, particularly Browse, Search, CMS, and Product Catalog.

- Proven experience architecting high-scale Search platforms, including indexing, relevance, ranking, autocomplete, faceting, filtering, and query performance.

- Strong experience designing Product Catalog and product-information architectures, including SKU, category, attribute, variant, ingestion, synchronization, and data-quality patterns.

- Strong understanding of headless CMS, content delivery, APIs, caching, CDN, and content orchestration.

- Hands-on experience with Kafka or equivalent event-streaming technologies.

- Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resiliency, high availability, fault tolerance, and performance engineering.

- Experience defining and governing architecture standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, and technical roadmaps.

- Strong understanding of application and API security, identity, access control, and secure integration patterns.

- Experience with observability, monitoring, tracing, logging, and operational excellence for large-scale platforms.

- Strong stakeholder-management and influencing skills, with experience working with senior technology and business leadership.

- Proven ability to lead architecture discussions, challenge assumptions, and make sound technical decisions in complex environments.

- Strong mentoring and technical leadership capabilities.

- Excellent communication, presentation, and problem-solving skills.