Principal Software Architect

Job title: Principal Software Architect 

Reports to: EVP, Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: Alpharetta, GA

Grade: 22

About Priority:

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

The Principal Software Architect plays a key role in defining and driving enterprise-wide architectural strategy to ensure Priority’s technology platform remains scalable, secure, and innovative. As a senior technical leader, you’ll act as a trusted advisor to engineering and executive leadership, guiding modernization initiatives and influencing product and infrastructure decisions. You will lead architectural governance, evaluate emerging technologies, and drive platform-wide alignment across services, teams, and technical domains. This role is ideal for someone who combines deep technical expertise with a strategic mindset and a passion for mentoring and elevating engineering excellence.

Responsibilities: 

• Define and lead the enterprise architecture vision and strategy aligned with business goals and long-term scalability. 
• Partner with executive stakeholders to influence product roadmaps, technology investments, and engineering priorities. 
• Lead architectural reviews and governance to ensure consistency and technical excellence across services and teams. 
• Evaluate emerging technologies and drive responsible adoption across the engineering organization. 
• Own cross-cutting platform concerns such as observability, scalability, resiliency, cost efficiency, and security. 
• Guide large-scale modernization efforts (e.g., legacy system unification, cloud-native migration, platform re-architecture). 
• Proactively identify technical risks and define patterns or frameworks to mitigate them. 
• Act as a technical thought leader and mentor, cultivating a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning. 
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data teams to ensure a cohesive technical ecosystem.

What Success Looks Like:

• Enterprise architecture is cohesive, scalable, and strategically aligned with long-term business goals. 
• Technology decisions are guided by clearly defined principles and are adopted consistently across teams. 
• Cross-functional collaboration and governance processes are streamlined and effective. 
• Modernization efforts improve system performance, cost-effectiveness, and technical agility. 
• Stakeholders and teams view you as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert. 
• Technical debt is proactively addressed and mitigated through well-defined patterns and frameworks. 
• You mentor and influence engineers across levels, elevating the technical bar and team performance.

Candidate Requirements: 

Required:

• 10-15+ years of software development experience, including 8+ years in technical leadership and architecture roles. 
• Experience leading architecture across multiple product lines or organizations. 
• Proficiency in enterprise-level architecture strategy, governance, and implementation. 
• Strong background in React, Redux, Node.js/JavaScript, Java, REST APIs, and GraphQL.
• Experience with relational (MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB) databases. 
• Deep experience with AWS or similar cloud environments, CI/CD, microse