Principal Architect

The Challenge

We're looking for a Principal Architect to set technical direction across OneTrust's product platform as part of Architecture Services, our central architecture team. Principal Architects are among the most senior individual-contributor technologists in R&D. They shape multi-year architecture strategy, work across product domains on problems no single team can solve alone, and represent architecture in the most consequential technical decisions facing R&D.

Your Mission

Architecture Strategy & Technical Direction

• Lead the multi-year architecture strategy across OneTrust's product domains, working with domain architects to align their technical plans into one platform direction.
• Lead resolution of cross-domain architectural challenges and align stakeholders on platform-wide technical direction.

Cross-System Integrity & Feasibility

• Set direction for the platform's non-functional requirements, including security, privacy, reliability, performance, scalability, and cost.
• Take part early in product discovery and roadmap planning to assess feasibility and identify risks before designs are final.

Standards & Governance

• Propose R&D-wide architecture standards, reference architectures, and patterns to the Architecture Guild, which owns and adopts them.
• Guide the design documentation process, and apply governance that doesn't block delivery wherever possible.

AI-Native Architecture Enablement

• Turn standards, reference architectures, and decision records into machine-readable context that AI coding agents use to follow our patterns.
• Build and guide the adoption of automated architectural checks, such as fitness functions, architecture-as-code, and AI-assisted design review.
• Build feedback loops that turn design decisions, review findings, and incident lessons into reusable context and patterns for future work.
• Design standards and agent context that work across tools, and back them with evals that catch regressions against our architectural standards. Help teams keep their delivery gains through tool changes and failed experiments.
• Stay hands-on with prototypes, reference implementations, and design work. Use AI agents to draft and test designs, explore trade-offs, and shorten feasibility work from weeks to days. Maintains technical credibility and leadership through prototypes, reference implementations, architecture automation, and hands-on experimentation.

Architecture Community & Guild Enablement

• Develop domain and squad architects through mentoring and design coaching, and help define how architects grow in scope and influence at OneTrust.
• Support R&D's Guilds, including the Architecture and AI Enablement Guilds, as centers of excellence that own and evolve engineering standards. Provide the structure, facilitation, and hands-on help they need to define, pilot, and roll out those standards.
• Lead the Architecture Guild as a community of practice through regular forums, design clinics, and retrospectives that share knowledge and bring systemic problems to light.
• Define architecture scorecards for system health and standards adoption, and work with Developer Experience to build scorecards, templates, and catalog ownership into the developer workflow.

Executive & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and UX leadership on R&D's key technical decisions, and represent architecture in executive forums.
• Advise leadership on trade-offs in cost, risk, and delivery speed, and make the business case for architecture investments.

You Are

A senior technical leader responsible for architecture direction across multiple domains. You think strategically, you're equally credible with engineers and executives, and your work shapes how OneTrust builds software for years to come. You lead through influence and enablement, and you help the architects around you grow. Your customers are OneTrust's engineering teams, and you succeed when they do.

Your Experience Includes

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 16+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Demonstrated impact on organization-wide technical strategy across multiple products or domains
• Deep expertise in distributed, cloud-native architecture, including microservices, microfrontends, event-driven integration, and API design
• Track record defining non-functional requirements and architecture governance at platform scale
• Experience designing for security, privacy, and compliance requirements in enterprise SaaS
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar), and a track record of helping teams adopt AI-native engineering practices

Bonus Points For

• Experience with compliance frameworks such as GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO/IEC 27001 or 27701
• Experience applying Team Topologies or similar operating models to architecture functions