What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Architect position at OP?
OP seeks an experienced and visionary Principal Architect to lead the architecture strategy for a transformative, multi-portfolio & multi-system program in a leading automotive company. The Principal Architect will play a critical role in driving architectural progress, aligning cross-functional teams, and ensuring a seamless, integrated customer journey across platforms, and will serve as the strategic technical leader, interfacing with multiple business units, partner architects, and product teams.
Key Responsibilities
OP is a technology consulting and solutions company, offering advisory and managed services, innovative platforms, and staffing solutions across a wide range of fields — including AI, cyber security, enterprise architecture, and beyond. Our most valuable asset is our people: dynamic, creative thinkers, who are passionate about doing quality work. As a member of the OP team, you will have access to industry-leading consulting practices, strategies & and technologies, innovative training & education. An ideal OP team member is a technology leader with a proven track record of technical excellence and a strong focus on process and methodology.
Key Responsibilities
- Define, evolve, and communicate the architecture vision and roadmap across different teams.
- Lead architectural strategy for customer data integration and unified customer experience initiatives.
- Design and guide the implementation of modern, event-driven, cloud-native architectures, primarily using AWS and complementary technologies.
- Review and lead integration architecture involving APIs, messaging frameworks, SSO, and canonical data models.
- Collaborate with Customer Experience, Dealer Experience, Marketing Tech, Analytics, and Connected Tech teams to deliver scalable and resilient solutions.
- Provide strategic and tactical technical leadership, helping mitigate architectural risks and resolving cross-team disagreements on complex trade-offs.
- Define and promote JSON-based canonical data models to ensure consistency and interoperability.
- Guide development teams across Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, and related frameworks.
- Represent architecture in high-level stakeholder meetings, gaining consensus across technical and business audiences.
- Mentor solution architects and contribute to enterprise-wide architecture standards and patterns.
- Strong experience in enterprise or solution architecture, including experience across multiple tech stacks and cloud platforms.
- Proven expertise in AWS cloud architecture, including compute, storage, networking, and security services.
- Deep understanding of event-driven, microservices-based, and API-first architectures.
- Strong knowledge of integration patterns, canonical data modeling, and messaging frameworks (e.g., Kafka, MQ).
- Hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, and JSON schema modeling.
- Familiarity with security, system resilience, and disaster recovery best practices.
- Excellent communication and business-facing presentation skills.
- Experience working across diverse technologies and domains, including customer data platforms.
- Ability to gain consensus among architects and stakeholders in complex or ambiguous technical situations.
- Strong understanding of architectural review processes and ability to propose alternative solutions or remediation plans when necessary.
- Strategic thinker with hands-on technical leadership.
- Comfortable navigating multi-portfolio, multi-system environments.
- Collaborative and confident in leading cross-functional architecture discussions.
- Strong communicator, able to bridge technical depth with executive-level clarity.
- Experience in automotive, connected vehicle, or financial services domains is a strong plus.
- 401(k).
- Dental Insurance.
- Health insurance.
- Vision insurance.
- We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity, equality, inclusion, and respect for people.
- The salary will be determined based on several factors including, but not limited to, location, relevant education, qualifications, experience, technical skills, and business needs.
- Participate in OP monthly team meetings, and participate in team-building efforts.
- Contribute to OP technical discussions, peer reviews, etc.
- Contribute content and collaborate via the OP-Wiki/Knowledge Base.
- Provide status reports to OP Account Management as requested.
OP is a technology consulting and solutions company, offering advisory and managed services, innovative platforms, and staffing solutions across a wide range of fields — including AI, cyber security, enterprise architecture, and beyond. Our most valuable asset is our people: dynamic, creative thinkers, who are passionate about doing quality work. As a member of the OP team, you will have access to industry-leading consulting practices, strategies & and technologies, innovative training & education. An ideal OP team member is a technology leader with a proven track record of technical excellence and a strong focus on process and methodology.
