The Challenge

We are seeking a Principal Domain Architect who will define and drive the technical vision for AI-native and agentic systems across the platform. This role combines deep system architecture expertise, AI innovation, and strategic technology leadership to build scalable, reliable, and enterprise-grade solutions. The Principal Architect will work closely with Product, AI Platform teams, Architecture Guild, and engineering leadership to guide the design of complex distributed systems, influence the product roadmap, and drive the adoption of modern AI-native architectures across the organization. This leader is expected to identify emerging engineering advancements and translate them into strategic business opportunities, while improving engineering efficiency and technical excellence across products.

Your Mission

• Define and deliver architecture for AI-native agentic systems, enabling scalable and enterprise-grade multi-agent solutions.
• Create and evaluate failure mode scenarios for agentic workflows and incorporate architectural safeguards to ensure resilience and reliability.
• Provide deep expertise in LLM architectures, prompt engineering, RAG approaches, model selection, model training, LoRA knowledge, cost optimization, performance, security, and quality considerations.
• Drive technology transformation within the domain, enabling teams to adopt modern AI-native architectures and engineering practices.
• Stay current with rapid advancements in the agentic AI ecosystem, continuously evaluating emerging frameworks, tools, and architectural patterns.
• Champion technical exploration and spikes to test new ideas, validate feasibility, and guide long-term architectural decisions.
• Collaborate closely with the AI Platform team to influence platform capabilities and ensure alignment with enterprise architecture.
• Define metrics, evaluation frameworks, and observability standards for agentic systems.
• Provide architectural guidance and oversight to engineering squads, reviewing designs and co-creating solutions for complex initiatives.
• Act as a technology leader for the domain, influencing the Architecture Guild and driving best practices across engineering teams.
• Ensure teams adopt architecture governance standards and best practices.
• Champion technical controls and disciplined engineering practices to proactively manage architectural complexity and technical debt.
• Design and build high-performance distributed systems capable of supporting enterprise workloads.
• Recognize industry trends and proactively influence the product and engineering roadmap.
• Mentor engineers and architects, strengthening the organization’s technical leadership and architectural maturity.

Architecture Leadership

• Design large-scale distributed systems and AI-powered architectures that support multiple products and integrations.
• Create and maintain architecture models, system diagrams, and technical design documentation covering current and future state architecture.
• Conceive and evolve product and service architectures ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Ensure systems are designed for high availability, performance, and ease of operations.

Strategic Technology Leadership

• Contribute to company-level engineering strategy and evaluate the business impact of emerging technologies.
• Lead engineering initiatives to improve platform capabilities and engineering productivity.
• Participate in strategic programs that impact company-wide technical direction.
• Influence cross-organizational architecture decisions and collaborate with Director and VP level stakeholders.

Engineering Excellence

• Recommend technologies and frameworks that increase engineering productivity and system reliability.
• Oversee technical aspects of major initiatives and ensure high engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers and technical leaders to strengthen system design capabilities and engineering best practices.

You Are

• A highly skilled technical leader with strong architectural vision.
• An analytical thinker with strong problem-solving and system design skills.
• A strong communicator capable of influencing leadership and cross-functional teams.
• Passionate about mentoring engineers and improving technical excellence across the organization.

Your Experience Includes

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 16+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
• Extensive experience with Java-based development using REST APIs, Spring Boot, and microservices architectures.
• Strong experience designing distributed, asynchronous, and event-driven architectures.
• Expertise building low-latency, high-throughput data pipelines and large-scale data platforms.
• Experience with data streaming and event processing technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Spark, or Flink.
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, distributed algorithms, and system programming.
• Experience with fault-tolerant messaging systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, AMQ, or ZeroMQ.
• Experience working with distributed data stores including MongoDB, Cassandra, CockroachDB, or CouchDB.
• Experience integrating applications with search platforms such as Elasticsearch or Solr.
• Proven experience mentoring engineers and building strong engineering practices.
• Strong ability to create and maintain architecture documentation and system design artifacts.
• Excellent leadership, verbal, and written communication skills.

Extra Impressive  

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Experience running large-scale web services and distributed platforms.
• Deep understanding of system performance tradeoffs, load balancing, and high-availability architectures.
• Experience with cloud-native and serverless architectures.
• Experience designing graph-based data models and graph architectures.
• Experience building AI-native platforms or LLM-powered systems.

The Challenge

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer that will report to the Development Manager / R&D Head. In this role, you will part of the R&D Team that works on mission-critical applications.

Your Mission

• Contribute in all phases of the development lifecycle.
• Write well designed, testable, efficient code
• Ensure designs are in compliance with specification
• Own your code in production, responding to incidents as they occur and participating in retros to determine how to be better in the future
• Prepare and produce releases of software components
• Support continuous improvement by investigating alternatives and technologies and presenting these for architectural review

You Are

• BE/BTech/MS degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related subject.
• Experience in software application development using Java, Spring and Hibernate. 
• Experience in Spring Boot, Micro services is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structure and design patterns.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL technologies.
• Sound understanding of concepts of Restful services.
• Solid understanding and experience of Application Server and middleware technologies.
• Unix/Linux environments and OS fundamentals.

About the Company:

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

We’re a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

About the Role:

As a Stable Kernel Principal Software Engineer, you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust.

Principal Software Engineers may be classified as individual contributors or people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

Core Responsibilities Include:

• Technical Impact: 
• Design and implement loyalty engine services in Java using the Spring framework, including transaction processing, tier calculation, reward accrual, and benefit eligibility.
• Design and implement RESTful API services in Java using the Spring framework, following contract-first development practices, with a focus on aggregation patterns, caching strategies, circuit breaking, and graceful degradation for latency-sensitive flows.
• Modern Java (17+) and familiarity with current Spring Boot conventions, including reactive patterns where appropriate.
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including service deployment, networking fundamentals, and managed services such as queues, caches, and databases.
• Identity and access management protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and SAML, including integration with enterprise identity providers and directory services.
• Establishing and evolving service architecture, including domain modeling, rules evaluation patterns, event-driven state management, auditability, API versioning, and backward-compatibility standards that support independent mobile release cadences.
• Defining integration contracts with upstream enterprise platforms (POS, CRM, commerce, identity providers) and downstream consumers (BFF, analytics, finance), including data normalization, error mapping, and retry logic.
• Building and maintaining integrations that pull transaction data from multiple channels and apply consistent earning logic regardless of source.
• Authentication and session management patterns, including token refresh, device trust, and silent re-authentication for long-lived mobile sessions.
• Implementing cross-cutting concerns such as idempotency, correlation IDs, observability, and audit event emission.
• Implementing robust state management for account-level aggregations, provisional and finalized reward states, and period-based accrual tracking.
• Designing test strategies for complex business rules, including edge cases around split-tier earning, return adjustments, forward offsets, delegate activity aggregation, and high system reliability.
• Implementing security and audit concerns: role-based access, 2FA for redemption flows, full audit trails for all state changes.
• Designing and involving yourself in CI/CD and automated testing for high system reliability.
• Providing expert feedback that improves the overall delivery of work and ensuring a high standard of quality across the project.
• Using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor to accelerate delivery while maintaining code quality and architectural standards.
• Business Alignment: 
• Clarifying strategic outcomes and influencing roadmaps and projects.
• Identifying, suggesting, and driving improvements in your customers' end-to-end experience.
• Aiding in estimating work for new business with more unknowns and coaching others in estimation best practices. 
• Interacting with Others: 
• Coordinating across the entire company.
• Influencing the entire organization to make changes to support your work.
• Advising teams across the company.
• Autonomy & Ambiguity: 
• Designing a long-term roadmap with no direction. 
• Translating customer and business needs and strategic direction into projects and consistently simplifying high-complexity situations.
• Coaching and mentoring others in tackling ambiguity.
• Problem-Solving:
• Decomposing strategic direction into projects:
•  Planning, communicating, and executing to solve our most challenging problems.
• Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and innovation.
• Anticipating most risks and driving simplification to mitigate risks ahead of time. 
• Escalating issues while solving them in parallel ensuring others are informed.
• Leadership:
• Proposing new organization-level processes to improve key areas such as team throughput, employee happiness, or product engagement.
• Driving best practices across the organization.
• Exhibiting exceptional mentoring abilities and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement by
• identifying and nurturing potential in others 
• providing strategic guidance
• helping develop career paths for team members 
• Leading projects.
• Setting the strategic direction for projects or areas of technology, leading multiple project teams, and influencing decision-making at higher organizational levels. 
• Exhibiting strong capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiating, and problem-solving in complex scenarios. 
• Mentoring and developing other leaders within the team, fostering a culture of innovation, and contributing significantly to organizational goals.

Deep Expertise With:

• Java for server-side development.
• The Spring framework ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data).
• Domain-driven design principles, including bounded contexts, aggregates, and domain events.
• RESTful API design principles, including contract-first approaches and OpenAPI/Swagger.
• Event-driven and message-oriented patterns (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS) for reliable state transitions and integration.
• Integration patterns: API gateway, circuit breaker, retry/backoff, caching (Redis or similar), ETL or event-based data flows, and idempotency.
• Relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) with strong skills in schema design, query optimization, and transactional integrity; familiarity with NoSQL datastores a plus.
• Rules engine patterns or configurable business logic frameworks.
• CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar, including pipeline authoring and deployment automation.
• Containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• SCM tools such as Git.
• Observability tooling such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or OpenTelemetry.
• Automated testing at multiple layers: unit (JUnit, Mockito), integration, contract testing, and scenario-based validation of business rules.

General Requirements:

• 10+ years of development experience with an emphasis on back-end development. 
• Extensive experience serving as a trusted consultant to stakeholders and cross-functional teams, providing expert guidance on backend service design, delivery, and integration.
• Degree in Computer Science or relevant field or experience. 

Nice to Haves:

• Experience building loyalty, rewards, or financial calculation engines.
• Experience building BFF or API aggregation layers for mobile applications.
• Familiarity with Salesforce CRM, Commerce Cloud, or Identity integration patterns.
• Experience with POS system integration and transaction-level data processing.
• Background in fintech, payments, or systems where auditability and financial accuracy are critical.
• Experience modeling complex account hierarchies (parent-child organizations, delegate/role structures).
• Experience with feature flagging and progressive rollout.
• Experience working alongside mobile teams to negotiate and iterate on API contracts.

A Bit More Info:

Minimum Base Compensation: $170,000

This is a full-time position.

Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days.

Minimal travel is associated with this role.

Our generous total compensation package includes:

• Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment
• 401k with above-average company matching 
• Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance
• Optional Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account participation
• Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
• EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents
• $3000+ annual industry educational budget 
• Paid time off and paid holidays 

*Note – We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered.

Stable Kernel’s culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values:

• we work with integrity always
• we respect our work and each other
• we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing
• we stay hungry for new challenges

If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you.