Deputy Director – Software Engineer & Application Architecture Senior Principal Engineer

Overview

Application Architecture plays a pivotal role in software development activities and long-term initiative planning and collaboration across the Strategy & Transformation (S&T) organization. Software Engineering is the cornerstone of scalable digital transformation across PepsiCo’s value chain. This leader will establish an end-to-end vision of the overall application design and provide technology leadership to the application architecture in terms of focus, technical direction, and breadth of coverage of relevant technologies.

Responsible for architecting, designing, and analyzing the logical and physical architecture for digital products and applications. Defines the technology stack, reusable design patterns, and standards to ensure scalability, performance, and maintainability. Develops logical and physical architecture, including front-end/back-end separation, database design, and workflow sequencing, while optimizing for performance and cost efficiency. Utilizes advanced technology solutions to define monitoring strategies for performance, availability, and system health. Identifies potential technical risks and develops mitigation strategies to ensure reliability and business continuity. Evaluates and selects appropriate frameworks, tools, and technologies for digital product development and deployment, and provides architecture guidance and standards to ensure consistent implementation by engineering teams.

Responsibilities

Strategy​ 

• Create the vision and guide a team of engineers to build and support Platform and Solution Engineering across S&T core priorities
• Lead multi-discipline, high-performance work teams distributed across remote locations effectively. Build, manage, develop, and mentor a team of engineers
• Interact with executives across the company to lead the narrative around software engineering
• Manage and appropriately escalate delivery impediments, risks, issues, and changes tied to the engineering initiatives to the stakeholders
• Develop application architecture strategy in alignment with the Business goals
• Review business drivers and strategies to understand the implications to the application architecture and identify/mitigate risks to solutions
• Champion and communicate the application architecture to business leaders and contracting teams, associating the implication of the architecture to objectives/drivers/goals

Architecture

• Define the conceptual and detailed architecture for the development of applications and oversee the evolution of that architecture as the platform is deployed across the entire organization​
• Ensure adherence to architecture processes, principles, policies and standards for the enterprise​
• Define transition steps and strategy from the current to the future application architecture​
• Define development guidelines and standards to be utilized in application development and integration​
• Develop methods to integrate systems that interact and extend across organizational and functional lines​
• Develop and maintain application architecture models, processes and documentation
• Analyze the current IT ecosystem application architecture to identify weaknesses and develop opportunities for improvements​

Innovation

• Identify emerging technologies that can enable the overall business architecture​
• Contribute to the development of proof of concepts or prototypes​
• Partner with associates to build a comprehensive reference architecture, examine existing frameworks and prepare for the future

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field  
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science or Engineering preferred 
• Minimum of 10 years of relevant software development and engineering leadership experience 
• 10+ years of experience on architecting fault tolerant, high scale distributed systems  
• Commanding knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design   
• Working knowledge of programming languages beyond C#, Java, C or C++ (e.g. Ruby, Python, Perl)  
• Experience with Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and cloud specific PaaS and SaaS solutions , Postgre, Mongo DB, Spring Boot 
• Experience with mission critical, 24x7 systems  
• Experience with high throughput cloud native distributed systems  
• Experience implementing and consuming large-scale web services  
• Deep knowledge of design patterns  
• Experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, React-Redux or other front-end frameworks  
• Full stack engineering experience
• Experience defining and driving enterprise application architecture strategy and governance
• Experience implementing monitoring, observability, and reliability practices for large-scale systems
• Experience with cloud cost optimization and build/run-time cost analysis (FinOps)
• Experience building reusable platforms, shared services, or reference architectures
• Familiarity with AI-enabled development tools and modern engineering practices

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong attention to detail and extremely well-organized
• Ability to be able to interface with the business and recognize their needs and priorities 
• Ability to work cross functionally with product, service design and operations across the organization
• Demonstrated passion for excellence with respect to Engineering services, education, and support
• Strong interpersonal skills, ability to navigate through a complex and matrixed internal environment
• Ability to work collaboratively with regional and global partners in other functional units
• Ability to navigate a complex organization and to influence and lead people across cultures at a senior level