Principal Software Architect

About the Role

Own the end-to-end architectural vision for a flagship enterprise product used by millions worldwide. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you sit at the intersection of technology strategy and hands-on execution - driving scale, resiliency, and AI-first innovation while working closely with engineering leaders and scrum teams.

How You Will Make an Impact

• Own E2E Architecture. Lead architectural design across the full stack - from data ingestion and API design to event-driven orchestration and multi-tenant SaaS delivery - ensuring coherence and quality as the product evolves.
• Drive Scale & Resiliency. Architect systems built to withstand failure, not just perform under ideal conditions. Own scale and resiliency outcomes end-to-end: capacity planning, failure mode analysis, SLA/SLO definition, observability instrumentation, and post-incident architectural improvement. Apply patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and graceful degradation at enterprise scale.
• Lead AI Transformation. Champion Agentic AI adoption - autonomous agent orchestration, multi-agent workflows, LLM integration pipelines, and AI harnessing frameworks - embedding intelligence natively into the product architecture. Partner with product and engineering leadership to identify AI opportunities and define the architectural patterns that make them viable and maintainable at scale.
• Foster Innovation. Continuously evaluate emerging technologies - AI/ML frameworks, cloud-native services, OSS ecosystems - and drive purposeful adoption where it delivers measurable impact.
• Multiply Engineering Excellence. Mentor engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and cultivate a culture of technical rigour and pragmatic problem-solving.

What You Bring

Core Experience

• 17+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years in enterprise software and 5+ years as a Principal or Staff Architect.
• Hands-on engineering depth across Java, Python, and full-stack development - comfortable writing, reviewing, and reasoning about production code at any layer of the stack.
• Proven experience designing and driving high-performance, highly available, and horizontally scalable enterprise-grade systems serving millions of concurrent users.
• Hands-on experience with serverless architectures - FaaS, event-driven patterns, and cloud-native services at scale.
• Deep expertise in public cloud platforms (AWS) and cloud-native architecture.
• Strong command of software design patterns - distributed systems, event-driven architecture, CQRS, saga patterns, and microservices - with the judgment to apply them appropriately.
• Experience building and operating multi-tenant SaaS products on public cloud.
• Solid performance engineering background: load modelling, benchmarking, bottleneck resolution in distributed systems.

Security & Compliance

• Deep understanding of security architecture principles - zero-trust design, defence-in-depth, least-privilege access, and secure-by-default patterns applied at the system and API level.
• Secure SDLC ownership: threat modelling, static and dynamic code analysis, vulnerability and dependency scanning, penetration testing, and security gate integration into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience securing multi-tenant SaaS platforms - including data isolation, tenant boundary enforcement, secrets management, and encryption at rest and in transit.
• Familiarity with AI-specific security concerns - prompt injection, model poisoning, data leakage through LLM context, and guardrails for Agentic AI systems operating with elevated permissions.
• Working knowledge of enterprise compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR) and the ability to translate compliance requirements into concrete architectural controls.

AI & Data Expertise

• Hands-on experience architecting Agentic AI systems - LLM-powered agents, tool-use pipelines, RAG, and multi-agent orchestration using Claude (Anthropic) and frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, and CrewAI.
• Demonstrated ability to harness AI across the product lifecycle - from embedding AI features into core workflows to optimising inference pipelines for latency and cost.
• Data platform architecture experience: Data Lakes, Snowflake, streaming pipelines, and AI-ready data foundations.
• Familiarity with MLOps/LLMOps: model versioning, observability, prompt governance, and responsible AI principles.
• Well versed with AI-assisted development tools including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Serena - using them to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and model best practices for engineering teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Scala for data engineering or stream processing.
• Knowledge of JavaScript / Angular or React for full-stack architectural depth.
• Familiarity with AI governance, explainability, or responsible AI frameworks.
• Contributions to internal developer platforms or architectural guilds.

The Mindset We're Looking For

You see architecture as both a craft and a responsibility. You zoom out to the strategic picture and zoom in to the detail when it matters. You bring a structured, first-principles problem-solving mindset to ambiguous challenges, communicate trade-offs with clarity, and design not just for today's requirements but for the next three years of change.

What's in it for you?

• Join an ever-growing, market disrupting, global company where the teams - comprised of the best of the best - work in a fast-paced, collaborative, and creative environment! As the market leader, every day at NICE is a chance to learn and grow, and there are endless internal career opportunities across multiple roles, disciplines, domains, and locations. If you are passionate, innovative, and excited to constantly raise the bar, you may just be our next NICEr!

Enjoy NICE-FLEX!

• At NICE, we work according to the NICE-FLEX hybrid model, which enables maximum flexibility: 2 days working from the office and 3 days of remote work, each week. Naturally, office days focus on face-to-face meetings, where teamwork and collaborative thinking generate innovation, new ideas, and a vibrant, interactive atmosphere.

Req ID: 10975
Reporting into: Tech Manager
Role Type: Individual Contributor