Principal Product Architect

Overview

The Principal Product Architect will play a pivotal role in leading the design and architecture of scalable, secure, and highly available SaaS products, with an emphasis on public cloud design and deployment.  This is a senior-level position requiring deep expertise in cloud technologies, SaaS models, and a proven track record of successful SaaS product deployment.

You will be responsible for defining the architectural vision, ensuring the scalability, security, and performance of products within your purview. 

The Principal Product Architect partners with product management to ensure product roadmaps and release planning and align with the defined technology strategy.  This role guides product engineering teams in the architecturally sound product design for public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid product deployments and maintains a product technology roadmap to achieve target state product alignment. This role focuses on technology assessments, proofs-of-concept, living architectural artifacts in the architecture governance lifecycle, and ensuring product design compliance with architecture, security, and operational standards.

This role provides thought leadership and, through the product technology roadmap, collaborates with product leadership to reconceive existing products to cloud native designs. This person engages with product engineering, technical architecture, security and operations to ensure compliance with reference product models.

The Principal Product Architect brings a blend of commercial SaaS product design, technical expertise, cross functional acumen, and translates complex requirements into actionable plans while promoting innovation, collaboration, and operational efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Architectural Strategy
• Defines and communicates the architectural vision and strategy for our healthcare SaaS products. Provides guidance to product engineering on design, operational optimization, deployment pipeline best practices, and automation opportunities
• Architects and implements cloud-native SaaS products that perform at scale. Designs and manages the architecture of complex, cloud and hybrid products for elasticity, availability, and resiliency. Applies cloud-native design principles and employs best practices to ensure seamless integration of security, infrastructure, services, and applications in public cloud
• Technical Oversight:
• Maintains a holistic product technology scorecard including a technical roadmap, technical debt inventory, and compliance to product security, architecture, and operational reference models
• Provides technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams, ensuring best practices in software design and development. Fosters a culture of innovation and continuous learning within the team
• Scalability and Performance:
• Champions the use of elastic, serverless cloud-native design concepts for highly scalable and resilient SaaS products, ensuring that products comply with AWS Well-Architected Framework and best practices.
• Security and Compliance:
• Ensures that all solutions adhere to industry standards and regulations, with a strong focus on data security and privacy.
• Produces and shepherds architecture artifacts and designs through the architecture governance process
• Collaboration:
• Collaborates with stakeholders, clients, product management, engineering, technical platform architects, security, and operations teams to understand needs and translate them into actionable product architecture designs aligned with business goals.
• Supports new products and product releases through serverless cloud-native design and microservice architecture models.
• Defines the technical vision and roadmap for cloud-native SaaS products, ensuring alignment with strategic technology direction.
• Collaborates with stakeholders and clients to understand their needs and translate them into actionable product architecture designs aligned with business goals
• Collaborates with product engineering teams, technical architects, security and operations on product design, including serverless cloud-native design and microservice architecture models, in support of new products and product releases
• Collaborates with product management, engineering, and operations teams to define the technical vision and technical roadmap for cloud-native SaaS products. Consults with Product Management to ensure the product roadmap incorporates strategic technology direction
• Innovation:
• Drives the adoption of emerging technologies and methodologies, such as microservices, serverless architectures, AI/ML, into the SaaS products. Stays abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends, and incorporates them into the architectural roadmap

Qualifications

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Advanced critical thinking and problem solving skills as demonstrated by the ability to listen, collect, data, and make successful recommendations
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to lead technical discussions and influence decision-making processes related to product architecture
• Ability to cultivate internal relationships and effectively engage with technical and non-technical stakeholders, share insights, and drive innovation
• Strong knowledge of the appropriate use of AWS services and awareness of AWS cost management and optimization strategies
• Ability to apply cloud architecture principles, including scalability, high availability, data retention, disaster recovery, and security best practices.
• Intermediate knowledge of utilizing compliance frameworks and regulations (e.g., HITRUST, HIPAA, SOC 2)
• Familiarity with Identity and Access models in on-prem and public cloud
• Advanced proficiency in cloud-native serverless application design and development, microservices architecture, and event driven design patterns
• Strong experience with monitoring and observability tools, including AWS CloudWatch
• Demonstrated practice of emotional intelligence that is used to work effectively in a deadline driven, agile environment
• Expertise in cloud service design patterns and architectures, including multi-region and multi-tenant SaaS models

Experience

• 10 years experience in application or solution architecture
• 8 years experience in cloud architecture, cloud engineering, cloud-native application design and deployment
• 5 year proven track record of successfully designing, deploying, and managing large-scale, complex serverless SaaS solutions on public cloud, preferably AWS.
• 5 years experience with modern development practices such as CI/CD, infrastructure as code (IaC), and DevOps

 Preferred Experience

• 5 years experience as an architect in a commercial SaaS environment
• 5 years experience operating within an architecture governance framework

Required Training, Certification and Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field or equivalent experience
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (or equivalent advanced certifications)

Preferred Training, Certification and Education

• Master’s degree
• Other relevant certifications (e.g., TOGAF, ITIL, Cloud Security) are a plus

Working Conditions:

• Home Office/Remote
• Occasional overnight travel (up to 10%) by land and/or air
• Must be able to use equipment at workstation for up to 8 hours daily

Benefits Overview

At NASCO, we trust our workforce to be fully remote, working from their home. This benefit offers significant, personalized outcomes for each associate including work/life balance, savings on commuting, work clothing, and increased time to spend on personal activities.

Our full benefit package is designed to support the physical, mental, and financial health of our associates. We offer:

Physical and Mental Health Benefits

• Choice of Blue Cross Blue Shield Medical, Dental, and Vision Plans
• Telehealthcare – for Medical and Behavioral visits
• Generous PTO with buy/sell options
• 9 Company holidays, a floating day off, and a day off for volunteering
• Employee Assistance Program
• Wellness program - earn insurance discounts or credit towards health-related items

Financial Health Benefits

• 401K Plan with employer matching contributions
• Company-funded spending/reimbursement accounts to help with out-of-pocket medical expenses
• Bonus and Recognition programs
• Tuition Assistance
• Consultation with financial planner
• Basic Life & AD&D Insurance, Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance provided, and Supplemental Term Life Insurance is available
• Group Discount programs - mobile, technology services, etc., to help you save money

Other Benefits

• E-Learning – Comprehensive and current library of e-learning and performance support assets, available on demand and at no cost

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, among other grounds, race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, gender identity, protected veteran status or status as an individual with a disability. Must have legal authority to work in the US.

We will not accept applicants that use AI when answering the screening questions. Applicants who use AI to answer any questions or to complete their application will not be considered for employment.