Lead the Architecture engineering team to design scalable and resilient SaaS platforms, manage architectural direction, and mentor senior engineers.
At StarCompliance, we build software that supports critical compliance needs for global clients. We rely on experienced engineering leaders not only to deliver high-quality services, system designs and code, but to help shape how all teams work and how systems evolve.
We’re looking for a Principal Engineering Lead to play a lead role within our Architecture engineering team. This role is suited to highly capable lead engineers/architects who combine strong technical architecture expertise with sound decision making judgement at scale, a service mindset, and a collaborative approach.
The role blends hands-on architectural depth with organisational leadership. You will set the architectural direction, chair the Architecture Forum, and ensure that our systems are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective at scale. You will line-manage two Principal Architect Engineers and work closely with engineering, product, security, and operations leaders.
This position requires strong technical authority, the ability to navigate complex stakeholder input, and the credibility to influence senior engineers and leaders across the organisation.
How you work is critical. We value engineering leaders who communicate clearly, build trust, challenge ideas constructively, and take ownership not just of systems, but of outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the target software architecture for a distributed, multi-tenant SaaS platform operating at scale.
- Ensure the continued effective documentation of these systems, ensuring the catalogue is in a healthy state.
- Contribute to the wider organizations engineering teams design of highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable systems using modern distributed systems principles.
- Work closely with peers in Platform and Infrastructure to continue to evolve our service delivery practices.
- Ensure principles that are followed are turned into established re-usable patterns.
- Evolve our multi-tenant architecture patterns, including tenant isolation, data partitioning, security boundaries, and scalability models.
- Provide deep expertise in messaging and integration patterns event-driven architectures, pub/sub, CQRS, eventual consistency, idempotency, etc.).
- Chair the Architecture forum, continuing to evolve our robust approach to complex decision making.
- Ensure architectural decisions balance performance, security, operability, cost, and developer productivity.
- Promote consistency without stifling autonomy, enabling teams to move fast on a well-defined platform foundation.
- Mentor senior and principal engineers, raising the overall architectural maturity of the organization.
- Work closely with engineering leadership to align architecture with delivery realities.
Skills and Experience
- Expert-level C# and .NET Core knowledge, with experience designing and evolving large-scale, microservices systems.
- Deep hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure, including core services, networking, identity, security, and platform services.
- Proven expertise in distributed systems design, including event-driven and message-based architectures, consistency models and trade-offs, failure modes, resilience patterns, and recovery strategies.
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architectures, ideally in a production environment at scale.
- Strong knowledge of messaging technologies and patterns.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) is highly desirable.
- Familiarity with modern observability, monitoring, and operational tooling.
Minimum Qualifications
- Typically 10+ years of commercial software development experience with at least several years of these in a multi-tenant, cloud hosted organization.
- Experience working with enterprise-scale SaaS platforms.
- Relevant certificates are a plus, but not essential.
- Right to work in the country of employment.
StarCompliance Background Checks
All positions require pre-employment screening due to employees potentially having access to highly sensitive and confidential information involving finance and compliance; candidates must be trustworthy and have a heightened sensitivity to protecting confidential financial, professional information. To be eligible for employment with StarCompliance, candidates must undergo a rigorous background investigation with checks including, but not limited to, criminal record history, consumer credit, employment history, qualifications, and education checks.
Equal Opportunity Employer Statement
We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, marital/civil union/domestic partnership status, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by country, state, or local laws.
This policy applies to all employment practices within our organisation, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. StarCompliance makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time. For more information, please request a copy of our Equal Opportunities Policy.
Top Skills
.Net Core
C#
Azure
Terraform
Similar Jobs
Artificial Intelligence • Productivity • Software • Automation
Join Zapier's Events Team as a Backend Engineer to enhance foundational event and queuing services, ensuring reliability and scalability. Collaborate with a tight-knit team, advocate for user experience, and manage tasks effectively while exploring new technologies.
Top Skills:
AuroraAvroAWSGoKafkaLambdaPythonRedisS3SqsTerraformTypescript
Consumer Web • Digital Media • Software
Drive revenue growth by closing new business deals, executing consultative sales, continuous learning, and collaborating with teammates to improve performance.
Top Skills:
Automation ToolsSaaSZapier
Consumer Web • Digital Media • Software
Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer position focusing on building, shipping features, and improving code quality using React, TypeScript, and Ruby on Rails.
Top Skills:
ReactRuby On RailsTypescript
What you need to know about the Seattle Tech Scene
Home to tech titans like Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle punches far above its weight in innovation. But its surrounding mountains, sprinkled with world-famous hiking trails and climbing routes, make the city a destination for outdoorsy types as well. Established as a logging town before shifting to shipbuilding and logistics, the Emerald City is now known for its contributions to aerospace, software, biotech and cloud computing. And its status as a thriving tech ecosystem is attracting out-of-town companies looking to establish new tech and engineering hubs.
Key Facts About Seattle Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 287,000; 13% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, software, biotechnology, game development
- Funding Landscape: $3.1 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Madrona, Fuse, Tola, Maveron
- Research Centers and Universities: University of Washington, Seattle University, Seattle Pacific University, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
