Principal Architect

Role overview

The Principal Architect leads a small architecture team for a software portfolio serving landscape and arborist professionals, setting the technical direction across mature, actively used products. This is a hands-on player/coach role reporting to the CTO, pairing code-level work with mentorship and cross-team coordination. The focus is on executing a forward-looking architectural plan while a large, living codebase keeps running in production.

Responsibilities

- Translate the multi-year architecture roadmap into sequenced, visible work and surface cross-team dependencies during quarterly planning. - Establish architectural standards, guardrails, and reusable patterns that feature teams can plug into without friction. - Build and maintain platform upgrade tooling and shared libraries across web and backend stacks (Angular and .NET). - Lead the ongoing effort to retire cross-team technical debt without slowing delivery. - Partner with platform, product, and feature-pod leaders so architectural decisions stay tied to customer outcomes. - Make patterns, documentation, and context clear enough for both engineers and AI coding agents to navigate the codebase.

Requirements

- Significant experience driving application and system architecture for a portfolio of mature, production software. - A bias toward simple, well-understood technology and community solutions over custom builds, with the willingness to push back on complexity. - Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted and agentic coding tools, and clear opinions on shaping a codebase that works well for both humans and agents. - Track record of working closely with product managers and tying technical decisions to measurable customer outcomes. - Demonstrated leadership of engineers, including direction-setting, coaching, and running a healthy team cadence. - Pragmatic communication style: holds strong opinions loosely and serves the team over personal preference.

Benefits and work setup

- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with multiple plan options, plus HSA/FSA, disability, and life insurance for U.S. employees; an employer-funded health spending account with drug, dental, and mental health coverage for Canadian employees. - Retirement plan matching (401(k) in the U.S., RRSP in Canada). - Unlimited paid time off, paid company holidays, and a company-wide winter break from December 24 through January 1. - Support for career development, including funding for tools, courses, and other learning resources. - Collaborative, supportive team culture that values outcomes, transparency, and shared success. - Candidates must already hold authorization to work in Canada or the U.S.; visa sponsorship is not available.