Principal Product Architect

At BI WORLDWIDE, we are committed to creating belongingness, where D&I is a priority. We invite you to join us as we continue to expand our culture of inclusivity, collaboration, and authenticity together.

We work a hybrid model (3 days in the office and 2 days work from home); this position is located in our Minneapolis Metro headquarters.

​​​​​​Our Corporate Product Development Group is seeking interest for a Principal Product Architect.

We are looking for a senior technical leader to serve as the primary architectural voice for our customer-facing platform. This person will set technical direction, establish standards, and work across teams to ensure our platform remains scalable, secure, and maintainable as the business grows.

This is a senior individual contributor position with no direct reports. Authority in this role comes from technical credibility, not org chart position.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate long-term business needs and translate them into architectural direction / decisions.
• Lead architecture decision-making across the platform (3 architects), including documenting decisions and trade-offs.
• Define and maintain platform-wide architectural standards -- covering scalability, reliability, security, observability, and maintainability.
• Work with product owners to define and design solutions to business problems.
• Partner with DevOps and infrastructure teams to keep application and infrastructure strategy in sync.
• Mentor development leads and architects across the organization. This role has no direct reports; influence is through expertise and relationship, not management.
• Own the security architecture and compliance for the platform -- ensuring systems are built and maintained to industry and BIW security standards.
• Work across product teams including product owners, engineering managers, developers, QA, UX, and leadership.
• Be an escalation point to lead incident response on critical issues if/when needed.
• Set the technical strategy for AI within the platform -- including partnering with product owners on where AI features add product value, introduce risk, and how they should be governed.
• Champion the responsible use of AI tools to improve engineering and team productivity.
• Stay current on relevant technology trends to set product technical strategy.

Role Scope

Most of the work in this role is strategic: setting direction, making architectural decisions, working with stakeholders, and keeping teams aligned. You will spend most of your time in design sessions, reviews, roadmap conversations, and cross-team technical discussions -- not writing production code. That said, the role requires genuine technical depth. You need to be able to read code, give real feedback in design and review sessions, and hold your own with senior engineers.

What We Are Looking For

An engineering background

We are looking for someone who spent a real portion of their career as an engineer before moving into architecture. We need someone whose technical judgment comes from having built and shipped software, not from a management track or a consulting background. You do not need to be heads-down in code today, but the foundation has to be there.

 

Distributed systems and architecture knowledge

• Experience designing and governing cloud-native, microservices-based platforms.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems patterns: service decomposition, event-driven architecture, API design, data consistency, and failure handling.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure. Our platform runs on AWS with Kubernetes and Kafka at the core; general cloud experience is what matters -- deep AWS specialization is not required.
• Experience establishing and maintaining architectural standards across multiple teams, including documenting decisions and trade-offs.
• Ability to reason clearly about quality attributes -- scalability, reliability, security, observability, maintainability -- and make trade-offs between them explicit.
• Ability to translate