- Pay Range for California: $148940.00 to $223300.00
- Pay Range for Bay Area: $167896.00 to $251720.00
- Note: Please note that this range represents the pay range for this and many other positions at Blue Shield that fall into this pay grade. Blue Shield salaries are based on a variety of factors, including the candidate experience, location (California, Bay Area, or outside California), and current employee salaries for similar roles.
- Role can be filled by a candidate requiring sponsorship: No
Your Role
The Stellarus Technology team builds and operates the platform for payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, pharma workflows, internal products, and marketplace capabilities. The Principal, Application Architecture will report to the Senior Director, Application Architecture. In this role, you will lead architecture decisions for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, and turn platform strategy into systems that engineering teams can build, test, deploy, and operate.
The platform is built around domain-owned microservices, reusable APIs, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, and a marketplace of capabilities that can be composed across customers and product lines.
This is a senior individual-contributor architecture role. You will own architecture direction for major platform capabilities and cross-domain initiatives, resolve high-impact technical risks and cross-team design conflicts, and stay close enough to the code and system design to make that direction credible to engineers. This role has overlap with enterprise architecture, and a background in enterprise architecture is a plus, but the work is closer to the code, system design, engineering execution, AI development improvements, vendor integration, and production tradeoffs than to enterprise architecture theater.
Stellarus generally takes a build-over-buy approach when the capability is core to our platform. This role will drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions for the platform capabilities it owns, and help teams design products for payer, provider, pharma, and partner workflows.
Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow – personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for people who are energized by creative and critical thinking, raising the technical bar across teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.
Responsibilities
Your Work
In this role, you will:
- Define application architecture direction for major platform capabilities, reusable services, and cross-domain technical initiatives.
- Lead architecture decisions for service decomposition, API ecosystems, event-driven workflows, vendor integrations, marketplace enablement, and shared platform capabilities.
- Partner with senior engineering, product, security, infrastructure, operations, and business stakeholders to align architecture with platform strategy.
- Drive build-vs-buy, integration consolidation, and modernization decisions that improve speed, scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Stay hands-on enough to review designs, read code, evaluate pull requests when needed, reason through incidents, and help teams make concrete technical decisions.
- Establish architecture standards and review practices that improve design quality, production readiness, security, observability, and operational ownership.
- Resolve high-impact technical risks, cross-team dependencies, design conflicts, and complex platform tradeoffs.
- Create reusable architecture frameworks, decision models, reference patterns, and AI-enabled guidance that improve engineering consistency.
- Establish patterns for customer-isolated data boundaries, multi-tenant workflows, shared services, pharma workflows, partner integrations, and marketplace enablement across the Stellarus platform.
- Mentor senior engineers, architects, and technical leads to raise the quality of technical judgment, documentation, and architecture execution.
- Document decisions and create patterns for AI tools and developers to operate efficiently: decision records, reference diagrams, API standards, service templates, AI skills, and architecture review notes.
Qualifications
Your Knowledge and Experience
- Bachelor's degree or High School Diploma/GED and 4 years of additional relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
- 10+ years of software engineering, application architecture, platform engineering, or related technical experience.
- Experience leading application architecture for distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices, internal platforms, or modernization initiatives.
- Strong hands-on engineering background with the ability to guide service design, API contracts, code structure, data modeling, testing, deployment, and production tradeoffs.
- Deep experience with domain-driven design, service decomposition, integration architecture, shared services, customer extensions, and reusable platform patterns.
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate platform strategy into clear architecture direction and execution standards.
- Experience designing and operating microservices and event-driven systems in a cloud environment. Azure experience is preferred; AWS or GCP experience is transferable.
- Strong API and data architecture judgment, including REST, OpenAPI, event contracts, PostgreSQL, analytics handoffs, authorization, tenant/customer isolation, and auditability.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leads.
- Healthcare, payer, pharma, regulated-industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platform experience is strongly preferred.
- Enterprise architecture experience is a plus, especially when paired with hands-on application architecture and delivery execution.
- Excellent written communication. You can make architecture decisions clear, concise, and useful to the teams who need to execute them.
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