Principal Software Architect - IGEN

The Principal Software Architect is a key member of the team that owns the technical architecture across IGEN's product portfolio including system design, technology selection, integration patterns, and the long-range architectural roadmap. Serve as the keeper of architectural integrity as IGEN modernizes from a legacy WinForms-based estate into a cloud-native, API-first, AI-augmented SaaS platform.

This individual will work in close partnership with the Chief Technologist, Technology leadership, and Product teams to translate IGEN's enterprise objectives into a coherent, durable, and clearly documented technical strategy. Lead architecturally by influence - across product teams, shaping the multi-year platform roadmap, mentoring engineers, and engineering leads, and leaving the engineering organization measurably stronger., Platform & System Architecture

• Key team member that owns the end-to-end architecture for IGEN's platforms- domain decomposition, service boundaries, integration patterns, data flow, and the API layer that will replace tightly-coupled module dependencies.
• Lead the architectural roadmap from today's estate to a modern, cloud-native, API-first, web-delivered platform - sequenced against the Azure migration and Platform Modernization workstream.
• Publish Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for every significant decision - making trade-offs visible, rationale durable, and the platform's evolution auditable for current and future engineering leaders.
• Set and enforce cross-product architectural standards - coding patterns, API contracts, eventing, error handling, observability, data integrity - so teams build on a coherent foundation rather than locally-optimized variants.

Cloud-Native & Microsoft Azure

• Partner with the Cloud Infrastructure Architect and DevOps to shape the Azure landing zone, network topology, security baseline, and deployment model - translating platform architecture into the cloud constructs that enable it.
• Lead application-level Azure architecture decisions: compute (App Service, Container Apps, AKS, Functions), persistence (Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Blob), eventing (Service Bus, Event Grid), API Management, identity (Entra ID), and key management.
• Steward cloud cost architecture - design for unit economics, scale efficiency, and predictable cost per module, in coordination with the Chief Technologist and Cloud Infrastructure Architect.
• Architect for resilience and recoverability - RPO/RTO targets, multi-region posture, failover patterns, and the disaster recovery design appropriate for clients operating against regulatory filing deadlines.

AI-Augmented Engineering & Agentic Practices

• Define the architectural reference patterns for AI-augmented software delivery at IGEN - how IGEN's standard AI toolchain (Microsoft Copilot family and the Anthropic suite, including Claude and Claude Code) is used safely, consistently, and effectively across the engineering organization.
• Establish guardrails for AI-generated code in a regulated-data environment - review patterns, security baselines (OWASP coverage of AI output), licensing posture, secrets handling, and SDLC integration in partnership with Application Security.
• Architect IGEN's path toward agentic and AI-native product capabilities - RAG patterns over compliance content, agent orchestration, tool/function design, evaluation harnesses, and the data and retrieval architecture that makes them production-grade.
• Track and evaluate emerging AI infrastructure (Azure AI Foundry, foundation models, vector and semantic search, MCP and agent frameworks, evaluation tooling) and form a defensible viewpoint on what to adopt, when, and why.

Integration & Data Architecture

• Key member of the team that owns the integration architecture for IGEN's enterprise touchpoints - SAP, IRS, TTB, state revenue agencies, and client ERP/billing systems - defining contracts, versioning strategy, idempotency, retry semantics, and health monitoring.
• Partner with the Director of Insight Engineering on the data architecture spanning the operational platform and IGEN's Snowflake + Fivetran analytics foundation. Snowflake is IGEN's strategic data platform - design for event sourcing from product, governed data contracts, and the architecture to productize Insight Engineering as a client-facing offering.
• Architect the API surface that exposes IGEN's tax determination, calculation, and reporting capabilities to internal modules and (over time) to client integrations - documented, versioned, and consumed by at least one internal integration as a milestone.

Security, Compliance & Quality

• Design with regulatory data sensitivity as a first-class constraint - IGEN's clients trust the platform with the data underlying their federal and state filings, and architectural choices must reflect that.
• Partner with Application Security on SOC 2 posture, secure SDLC, identity and access design, encryption (at rest and in transit), secrets architecture, and the security architecture for AI-augmented code paths.
• Define the architecture for testability and observability - what 'evidence of correctness' looks like at the platform level, how regressions are prevented across the Azure migration, and how the platform proves itself in production.

Leadership, Influence & Communication

• Lead architecturally across Software Engineering Leads, Senior Software Engineers, and product teams - by influence, not by direct authority. Make the right thing the obvious thing.
• Partner with the Chief Technologist on technology strategy, the FY2027 OKR portfolio, the multi-year architectural roadmap, and the technology narrative presented to the executive team.
• Partner with Product Owners and the Director of Product on what is buildable, when, and with what trade-offs - bringing architectural foresight into roadmap discussions early, not at the point of commitment.
• Mentor engineers and Engineering Leads on architectural thinking, design reviews, ADR authorship, and the discipline of trade-off reasoning.
• Live our values of High Performance, Caring Relationships, Strategic Foresight, and Entrepreneurial Spirit
• Find A Better Way by championing continuous improvement and quality control efforts to identify opportunities to innovate and improve efficiency, accuracy, and standardization
• Continuously learn and develop self professionally
• Support corporate efforts for safety, government compliance, and all other company policies & procedures
• Perform other related duties as required and assigned

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline - or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Software Architect, Principal Engineer, or Staff Engineer capacity on a non-trivial SaaS or enterprise software platform.
• Deep expertise in the Microsoft stack - C#, .NET (Framework and modern .NET), ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, SQL Server / Azure SQL - and the ability to make architecturally sound trade-offs within it.
• Production architecture experience on Microsoft Azure - App Service / Container Apps / AKS, Service Bus / Event Grid, API Management, Entra ID, Key Vault, Application Insights, and the operational practices that go with them.
• Demonstrated experience leading a meaningful legacy-to-modern migration - monolith decomposition, WinForms / WebForms / WCF modernization, API extraction, or a comparable transformation against a real-world client base.
• Hands-on fluency with AI-augmented development tooling - Microsoft Copilot (GitHub Copilot, Copilot in the IDE) and the Anthropic suite (Claude, Claude Code) are IGEN's standards - and a substantive viewpoint on how this class of tooling changes the architecture of how teams build software.
• Track record of producing durable architectural artifacts - ADRs, reference architectures, system diagrams that engineers actually use - and influencing technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Experience designing API-first systems - REST, gRPC, async/event-driven patterns - with explicit attention to versioning, contracts, and developer experience.
• Strong grasp of secure software architecture - OWASP, identity and access architecture, data protection, and the realities of operating regulated data in the cloud.
• Excellent written and verbal communication - able to brief engineers, the Chief Technologist, and (when needed) the President or executive team with equal precision.
• Ability to work independently or as part of a team, manage multiple priorities, and set both short- and long-range plans while adjusting direction as priorities change.

Preferred:

• Architecture experience in tax, compliance, financial services, or another regulated B2B software domain.
• Hands-on experience designing agentic AI systems - RAG, agent orchestration, tool/function design, evaluations, and the data and retrieval architecture that makes them production-grade.
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake as a strategic data platform, alongside Fivetran and modern analytics architectures - and the patterns that connect operational systems to a governed analytics foundation.
• Experience working in or with an organization undergoing Agile / SAFe transformation in parallel with cloud and platform modernization.