Principal Solution Architect

7-Eleven is an iconic family of brands with over 86,000 locations, surpassing every retailer in the world. We revolutionize convenience, restaurants and fuel through cutting edge innovation — working hard to be the customer's first choice. 7-Eleven empowers our employees to "activate awesome" and make a meaningful impact in their stores and communities every day. If you're ready to grow, lead and make a difference, come join our team and help shape the future of convenience.

7-Eleven’s Store Technology organization is seeking an experienced Principal Architect to lead the technical architecture for point-of-sale and related store technology platforms.

This fully hands-on role supports the POS team through solution design, coding, prototyping, code reviews, troubleshooting, and production issue resolution. The architect partners with Product, Store Operations, Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable software.

The ideal candidate brings deep POS or transaction-processing expertise, strong distributed-systems and cloud-native experience, and the ability to connect enterprise architecture with implementation details.

KEY DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own the technical vision, target architecture, and architecture roadmap for POS applications, services, integrations, APIs, data, and supporting store technology platforms.
• Remain hands-on by writing production-quality code, building prototypes and proofs of concept, troubleshooting complex defects, and contributing to critical implementation work with engineering teams.
• Translate business, product, and store requirements into pragmatic solution designs, technical specifications, architecture decision records, and executable delivery plans.
• Define and evolve architecture patterns for POS application services, REST APIs, integrations, data access, messaging, event-driven workflows, offline capabilities, and store-to-cloud communication.
• Lead architecture, design, code, and technical deep-dive reviews; set engineering standards; and provide clear, actionable guidance that improves software quality and maintainability.
• Design transaction-oriented systems for high volume, low latency, strong availability, resiliency, security, and graceful operation during connectivity or downstream service interruptions; define the non-functional requirements needed to support them.
• Evaluate technologies, frameworks, platforms, and vendor solutions through hands-on experimentation, benchmarks, technical assessments, and total-cost-of-ownership analysis.
• Guide modernization of legacy POS and store systems toward maintainable cloud-native services while managing technical risk, compatibility, migration sequencing, and business disruption.
• Partner with Cyber Security and Enterprise Architecture to embed security controls, privacy, compliance, governance, threat modeling, and secure software development practices into solutions.
• Drive CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, containerized deployments, automated testing, release engineering, and disciplined environment management.
• Work with engineering and operations teams to diagnose incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and improve monitoring, alerting, observability dashboards, and actionable metrics.
• Define practical quality engineering strategies across unit, integration, contract, functional, performance, resilience, and regression testing for POS and retail systems.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads through design collaboration, pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing; create concise architecture documentation, API contracts, runbooks, release plans, and sustainable handoffs.
• Communicate architecture options, trade-offs, risks, dependencies, estimates, and recommendations to engineering teams, stakeholders, and senior leadership.
• Establish and champion a KPI-driven engineering culture, using data, operational metrics, customer impact, and business outcomes to guide architecture, prioritization, investment decisions, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Provide technical leadership during major production incidents, driving rapid mitigation, root-cause analysis, and resilient architectural improvements that eliminate repeat failure patterns and minimize future business impact.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

EDUCATION: Bachelors/4 Year Degree. Master's Degree highly Preferred.

YEARS OF RELEVANT WORK EXPERIENCE: 12+ years

SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years of hands-on architecture or technical leadership on enterprise-scale systems.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture, distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, integration patterns, and secure software development.
• Hands-on programming and software design skills, including the ability to read, write, debug, and review production code for POS systems.
• Experience designing transaction-processing systems for high volume, low latency, availability, resiliency, and offline or intermittently connected operation.
• Expertise in APIs, messaging, data modeling, relational and NoSQL databases, service boundaries, and integration contracts.
• Advanced cloud, DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerization, platform engineering, observability dashboards, service health metrics, SLOs/SLIs, and production operations experience.
• Quality Engineering expertise across automation frameworks, performance and resilience testing, TDD, BDD, and test strategy.
• Experience with security architecture, threat modeling, identity and access controls, encryption, secrets management, compliance, and secure delivery.
• Ability to modernize legacy systems to maintainable cloud-native services with minimal business disruption.
• Strong troubleshooting experience with monitoring, distributed tracing, incident response, disaster recovery, root-cause analysis, and problem management.
• Sound architecture judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability and clearly explaining trade-offs.
• Strong documentation, stakeholder management, vendor evaluation, estimation, planning, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Experience

·       Experience in retail, store technology, POS, self-checkout, or payments.

·       Experience designing or modernizing legacy POS, store, edge, or device-integrated systems to cloud-native architectures.

·       Experience with payment flows, transaction integrity, device integrations, store networking, offline processing, reconciliation, or near-zero-downtime migrations.

·       Experience partnering with product, store operations, vendors, security, infrastructure, and cross-functional technology teams.

·       Experience integrating hardware through JPOS/OPOS interfaces or vendor device drivers/SDKs using Java or C++.

·       Knowledge of PCI DSS, EMV, payment-terminal integration, encryption, tokenization, and key management.

·       Experience containerizing and running Windows-based applications on Linux using Docker-compatible runtimes.

·       Experience applying AI/ML, generative AI, or intelligent automation to software delivery, observability, support, or retail operations.

Application Development & Architecture: Java, C, C++, Node.js, React, Windows Application Development, REST APIs, Spring Boot Framework, JSON, MongoDB, NoSQL Databases, Microservices Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, Distributed Systems, Enterprise Integration Patterns, Domain-Driven Design

Cloud & Platform Engineering: AWS, Azure, EC2, Lambda, Fargate, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway, Kinesis, Auto Scaling, CloudFormation, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes

DevOps & Observability: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, DevOps, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Loki, New Relic, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Observability Dashboards, Service Health Metrics

Methodologies & Delivery: Agile, SAFe Agile, CI/CD, TDD, BDD, Quality Engineering, QCE, Continuous Improvement, SSDLC

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This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of the work being performed by the individuals assigned to this job. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties and responsibilities.  Management reserves the right to amend and change the duties and responsibilities of this job to meet business and organizational needs, as necessary.   

If an hourly or salary range is included in this ad it represents the range 7-Eleven in good faith believes is the range of compensation for this role at the time of this posting. The Company may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in this state. This range may be modified in the future. No amount is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable under the terms and conditions of the applicable policies and plans. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, long-term incentive compensation, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

For a general description of all benefits 7-Eleven is offering in the US for the position, please visit this link.

For a general description of all benefits 7-Eleven is offering in Canada for the position, please visit this link.