Architect - United States
Company: Photon
Role summary
Architect - United States is a role at Photon in United States (remote). Posted 2026-08-27. Experience level: 10+.
- Job title
- Architect - United States
- Company
- Photon
- Location
- United States
- Work arrangement
- remote
- Category
- Software Engineering
- Experience level
- 10+
- Date posted
- 2026-08-27
You’ll be joining a high-level team at Photon where you can shape the technical landscape for large-scale enterprise projects. It’s an ideal spot for a seasoned expert who enjoys autonomy and wants to solve complex system design challenges in a collaborative environment.
Job description
Greetings Everyone
Who are we?
For the past 20 years, we have powered many Digital Experiences for the Fortune 500. Since 1999, we have grown from a few people to more than 4000 team members across the globe that are engaged in various Digital Modernization. For a brief 1 minute video about us, you can check https://youtu.be/uJWBWQZEA6o .
What will you do? What are we looking for?
Role: Principal Software Engineer
Location: Remote
Experience Level: 12+ Years
About the Role
We are seeking an exceptional Principal Software Engineer to provide high-level technical leadership, drive architectural vision, and design robust, scalable distributed systems. In this role, you will take ambiguous business challenges and turn them into resilient, production-grade cloud platforms.
You will champion modern engineering practices by leveraging an AI-native engineering approach —utilizing agent skills, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and spec-driven development to accelerate development lifecycles while maintaining high standards for performance, security, and maintainability.
Key Responsibilities
System Architecture & Design: Architect high-throughput, fault-tolerant backend services, distributed systems, and cloud-native solutions across AWS and GCP environments.
Technical Leadership: Guide cross-functional teams through complex technical decisions, set best practices for code quality, testing (TDD), and system reliability, and mentor senior engineering talent.
AI-Native Delivery: Integrate next-generation developer tooling (Cursor, Claude, autonomous agents, MCP workflows, and spec-driven design) to elevate team productivity and system delivery.
Data Engineering & APIs: Design high-performance REST APIs and scalable data/ETL pipelines across relational, document, and columnar data stores.
Production Ownership & DevOps: Drive end-to-end operational excellence, establishing robust CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), container orchestration, JVM profiling, and real-time observability.
Stakeholder Alignment: Partner closely with product management, engineering leaders, and key stakeholders to translate business goals into clear technical roadmaps.
Required Qualifications & Skills
Core Experience: 15+ years of hands-on software development experience building, scaling, and operating high-performance backend platforms.
Programming Mastery: Deep expertise in Java and Python , with strong command over algorithms, multithreading, concurrent programming, and JVM tuning/profiling.
Cloud Platforms:
AWS: Deep hands-on experience with Lambda, DynamoDB, SNS, SQS, S3, EC2/ASG, EKS, VPC, ElastiCache, RDS, Redshift, CloudWatch, and IAM/cross-account security.
GCP: Practical knowledge of BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Monitoring, and OpenTelemetry.
Data & Storage Systems: Extensive experience with relational and NoSQL databases, data warehouses, and analytics pipelines (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, Athena, Palantir Foundry, ETL workflows).
DevOps & Infrastructure: Strong proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Screwdriver/GitHub Actions/GitLab), and CloudTrail.
Modern AI Engineering: Demonstrated experience applying AI-assisted workflows (Cursor, Claude, MCP tools, agentic skills) to enhance software delivery.
Leadership & Communication: Outstanding communication skills with proven ability to align diverse stakeholders and mentor senior engineering peers.
Compensation, Benefits and Duration
Minimum Compensation: USD 56,000
Maximum Compensation: USD 196,000
Compensation is based on actual experience and qualifications of the candidate. The above is a reasonable and a good faith estimate for the role.
Medical, vision, and dental benefits, 401k retirement plan, variable pay/incentives, paid time off, and paid holidays are available for full-time employees.
This position is available for independent contractors
No applications will be considered if received more than 120 days after the date of this post