Sr Principal Architect, Foundational Platforms (Sterling)

Sr Principal Architect, Foundational Platforms Location: Nashville, TN or Sterling, VA or San Mateo, CA POSITION OVERVIEW The Sr Principal Architect leads enterprise architecture for the foundational platforms, standards, and practices used to build, deliver, secure, and operate software. This role sets technical direction across the software development lifecycle, developer platforms and tooling, observability and logging, reliability, and identity and authentication. Responsibilities include defining reference architectures and standards, guiding strategic technology decisions, mentoring teams, and partnering across Engineering, Security, Cloud, and Operations to improve developer productivity, security, reliability, and operational excellence. ESSENTIAL JOB SKILLS/DUTIES Define enterprise architecture and reference patterns for software delivery and engineering platforms. Establish standards for SDLC, developer tooling, observability, logging, reliability, and authentication. Lead architecture reviews and cross-domain technical decisions. Shape developer platform, self-service, automation, and developer experience strategy. Partner with Security on identity, service-to-service authentication, software supply chain, and platform security. Guide modernization and adoption of common foundational platform capabilities and standards. Mentor architects and senior engineers and partner with technology leaders on strategy. REQUIRED TECHNICAL SKILLS Software Delivery: Aligns SDLC, CI/CD, testing, release, and software supply-chain standards across domains. Developer Platforms: Aligns developer tooling, self-service, service catalog, and platform engineering standards across domains. Observability