Sr. Principal Architect

Job Description

Our Story: Litera, headquartered in Chicago, IL, is a fast-growing software company and one of the leading legal technology suppliers in the world. Serving over 90% of the world's largest law firms, our software is used by hundreds of thousands of lawyers every day. As a company recognized as one of the best places to work, we believe professional development, rewards programs, open communication, and transparent leadership all contribute to a unique and open work environment. Our employees are driven, energetic, passionate, and can make a direct impact on the future of the company.

The Opportunity: We seek a highly skilled and experienced Sr. Principal Software Architect who will demonstrate technical leadership and strong communication and presentation skills to join our dynamic and innovative technology team. As a senior leader on the team, you will be responsible for defining the requirements, designing, and shaping technology innovation at Litera.  This is a unique opportunity to play a key technical strategy role within a growing and ever-changing ecosystem. The role works closely with both the Engineering and Product teams and spans both products and the underlying technology platform.  Our customers rely on us to deliver innovative, strategic and forward-looking solutions. This is your chance to be a key member of a global software company.

Responsibilities / Day in the Life

• Develop innovative architectural solutions in a wide variety of problem sets and domains.
• Create and share architectural designs, best practices and technology roadmaps with cross-functional teams.
• Translate business and product requirements into technical requirements, models and software architectures.
• Focus on non-functional requirements, including deployment needs, scalability, performance and reliability when developing architectures and best practices.
• Develop “proof of concept” solutions to help demonstrate and communicate technical designs and desired architectures.
• Develop architecture and guidelines to move on-perm systems to SAAS based multi-tenant solutions on Azure Cloud.
• Drive adoption of new technology across the organization by delivering Proof of Concepts with supporting design diagrams, technical documentation, business impact analysis and ROI.
• Optimize cloud-based systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
• Mentor the team to work towards a common platform architecture across the organization.

Qualifications / About You

• 12+ years of software development experience with excellent .NET/C#, React and Typescript coding skills.
• 8+ years of experience working as a Software Architect.
• 5+ years of experience with Microsoft Azure and/or AWS cloud-native architectures.
• Outstanding communication and teamwork skills, with a proven ability to collaborate with, and influence others.
• BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, or Engineering (or related experience).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems architecture and microservices.
• Experience with building highly scalable and resilient cloud services.
• Experience developing reference architectures and proof of concept prototypes.
• Experience implementing modern security solutions including token-based authentication, OAuth 2.0 workflows, SAML authentication and authorization techniques.
• Preferable experience: Azure OpenAI/GPT/LLMs, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Service Bus, Azure Storage, Azure SQL, Azure CosmosDB, Lucene/Elasticsearch, Azure DevOps, CI/CD.
• Preferable certifications: Microsoft or other industry certifications in architecture a plus.
• Clearance of standard background check prior to employment with candidate consent.

Within 1 month, you will:

• Learn the functional areas of the products and intended uses.
• Establish relationships with key members of the leadership and architecture teams.
• Participate and contribute to assigned work activities and meetings (planning, daily standups, etc.).
• Acclimate to the environment and begin to gain insights into the technology and innovation opportunities that exist in the company.
• Contribute thoughts, ideas, relevant expertise in at least one key strategic initiative. Goal: expand to multiple initiatives over time.
• Review and learn key architecture team artifacts and ways of working – Product Inventory, Reference Architecture.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Contribute reference architecture and proof of concept improvements regularly.
• Develop subject matter expertise in more than one product area.
• Translate product vision into technical requirements, designs, and plans.Help shape the fut