Principal Solution Architect, Platform Engineering, SRE

Job Description
About the role
Reporting to the Head of Architecture for Platform Engineering, the Principal Solution Architect plays a crucial role in designing and delivering enterprise platform capabilities. Platform Engineering is chartered to deliver the shared capabilities that product engineering teams use to deliver secure, reliable, performant, high-quality products to clients faster.
Platform Engineering’s portfolio spans AI Engineering, API & Event Management, Front End, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Developer Experience & Quality, and Customer Identity & Access Management.
This role’s primary focus is SRE: architecting the reliability, observability, and incident management capabilities that allow engineering teams to operate their products with confidence at scale. Like every architect on the team, you will also contribute across all platform domains and may lead initiatives in any of them, so broad, enterprise-level platform thinking is as essential as SRE depth.
What you will be doing
You will make a significant impact on the company’s modernization and transformation journey by designing, documenting, and driving adoption of modern engineering patterns for next-generation platform capabilities and the ways product teams consume them.
In SRE, your focus spans the full reliability lifecycle, from designing for reliability and defining service level objectives, through observability and incident response, to learning from failure and eliminating operational toil, wherever infrastructure, application stacks, and operations intersect.
You will draw on significant hands-on software engineering experience in product delivery to turn complex business needs into thoughtful, practical solutions.
You will bring cloud-native patterns to our platforms, build roadmaps that clearly sequence the steps of our modernization journey, and apply enterprise architecture practices such as governance, ecosystem analysis, and vendor evaluation, while providing thought leadership on what is possible as we transform engineering culture at FIS. Specifically, you will be responsible for:
Contributing platform thinking and subject matter expertise across all platform domains, applying modern engineering and architectural patterns to design systems (APIs, services, events, data, UI, and supporting capabilities) that enable engineering teams to deliver product capabilities rapidly
Creating and communicating best-practice target-state designs that use cloud-native patterns and are easy for engineering teams to consume, supported by clear artifacts such as business case and process context, context and sequence diagrams, and architecture decision records
Leading the architecture and roadmap for SRE platform capabilities, including observability built on open standards such as OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, traces, real user and synthetic monitoring, and cost-aware telemetry pipelines), SLO-based alerting, AIOps and event correlation, incident response and on-call tooling, and runbook automation and self-healing that reduce toil
Embedding reliability into the paved paths product teams consume, including service level indicators, objectives, and error budgets; resilience patterns such as redundancy, graceful degradation, and failover; production readiness reviews; safe change practices such as progressive delivery and automated rollback; chaos and disaster recovery testing against defined recovery objectives; and blameless post-incident reviews that drive measurable improvement
Partnering with leaders across the Platform Engineering organization to introduce, socialize, and champion modernization of front-end, middle-tier, and back-end technology stacks within an AI-first delivery model
Leading evaluations of new and existing vendors for fit with Platform Engineering’s strategy, technology approach, and integration patterns
Defining and driving adoption of integration patterns across internal systems, services, and capabilities so that quality data, events, and services are available for consumption regardless of channel
Partnering with platform owners, product partners, and other stakeholders on the intake and evaluation of platform capabilities and features, influencing design decisions and approaches before execution and delivery begin
Validating designs through hands-on proofs of concept and reference implementations, and contributing to architecture reviews and governance across the team
Articulating the business value of the architectural roadmap, including fact-based “over the horizon” perspectives with options and trade-offs that align to the broader business and engineering strategy
What you will need
10+ years of solution architecture and senior software engineering experience, including significant hands-on product delivery, in a fast-paced, global software delivery organization that operates with ambiguity
Expert understanding of software and internet architecture, including modern front-end and back-end stacks, API management and identity and access management, cloud-native and on-premises infrastructure (containers,
Kubernetes, infrastructure as code), networking and internet connectivity, and browser and mobile application delivery
Deep expertise designing and delivering modern SRE capabilities, including SLO and error-budget practices, observability and telemetry architecture, AIOps, incident management and root cause analysis, resilience and disaster recovery design, and the engineering team interfaces needed for effective cross-team issue resolution
Strong understanding of how IAM, security, and network policies inherited by engineering teams affect the reliability, operability, and troubleshooting of their services
Demonstrated track record of delivering platform capabilities that power consumer-facing software products, especially API- and event-driven systems
Deep experience adopting and operating within a modern SDLC and engineering practice (AI-enabled development, DevSecOps, and platform-as-a-product)
Thorough understanding of modern information security and data protection practices and how to apply them across technology stacks in regulated environments
Collaborative, low-ego approach focused on business outcomes, with the ability to motivate and energize others and influence without authority to achieve common goals
Exceptional communicator who can navigate and influence at every level of the organization, tailoring the message to any audience to achieve the desired outcome
Preferred qualifications
Experience in financial services or other regulated industries, including operational resilience requirements and how they shape architecture decisions
Hands-on experience with commercial and open-source observability, AIOps, and incident management platforms at enterprise scale
Experience applying reliability and observability practices to AI and LLM-based systems, including agentic workloads
Undergraduate degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or another technical field preferred, but not required
Personal characteristics
Demonstrates sound judgment and flexibility, thinking comprehensively about issues and developing solutions that account for the broader context and strategy
Maintains a positive, adaptable approach to rapidly shifting priorities, topics, and environments
Takes initiative, translating strategy into action and driving delivery with a “roll up the sleeves” approach
Remains calm and structured under pressure, bringing clarity to high-stakes situations such as major incidents and critical decisions
Builds strong relationships and negotiates effectively with internal and external stakeholders, grounding decisions i

Skills
Kubernetes, LLM