Principal Product Architect

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We work a hybrid model (3 days in the office and 2 days work from home); this position is located in our Minneapolis Metro headquarters.

​​​​​​Our Corporate Product Development Group is seeking interest for a Principal Product Architect.

We are looking for a senior technical leader to serve as the primary architectural voice for our customer-facing platform. This person will set technical direction, establish standards, and work across teams to ensure our platform remains scalable, secure, and maintainable as the business grows.

This is a senior individual contributor position with no direct reports. Authority in this role comes from technical credibility, not org chart position.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate long-term business needs and translate them into architectural direction / decisions.
• Lead architecture decision-making across the platform (3 architects), including documenting decisions and trade-offs.
• Define and maintain platform-wide architectural standards -- covering scalability, reliability, security, observability, and maintainability.
• Work with product owners to define and design solutions to business problems.
• Partner with DevOps and infrastructure teams to keep application and infrastructure strategy in sync.
• Mentor development leads and architects across the organization. This role has no direct reports; influence is through expertise and relationship, not management.
• Own the security architecture and compliance for the platform -- ensuring systems are built and maintained to industry and BIW security standards.
• Work across product teams including product owners, engineering managers, developers, QA, UX, and leadership.
• Be an escalation point to lead incident response on critical issues if/when needed.
• Set the technical strategy for AI within the platform -- including partnering with product owners on where AI features add product value, introduce risk, and how they should be governed.
• Champion the responsible use of AI tools to improve engineering and team productivity.
• Stay current on relevant technology trends to set product technical strategy.

Role Scope

Most of the work in this role is strategic: setting direction, making architectural decisions, working with stakeholders, and keeping teams aligned. You will spend most of your time in design sessions, reviews, roadmap conversations, and cross-team technical discussions -- not writing production code. That said, the role requires genuine technical depth. You need to be able to read code, give real feedback in design and review sessions, and hold your own with senior engineers.

What We Are Looking For

An engineering background

We are looking for someone who spent a real portion of their career as an engineer before moving into architecture. We need someone whose technical judgment comes from having built and shipped software, not from a management track or a consulting background. You do not need to be heads-down in code today, but the foundation has to be there.

Distributed systems and architecture knowledge

• Experience designing and governing cloud-native, microservices-based platforms.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems patterns: service decomposition, event-driven architecture, API design, data consistency, and failure handling.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure. Our platform runs on AWS with Kubernetes and Kafka at the core; general cloud experience is what matters -- deep AWS specialization is not required.
• Experience establishing and maintaining architectural standards across multiple teams, including documenting decisions and trade-offs.
• Ability to reason clearly about quality attributes -- scalability, reliability, security, observability, maintainability -- and make trade-offs between them explicit.
• Ability to translate business requirements into practical technical designs.

AI strategy and adoption

• Experience implementing AI-driven product features (e.g., generative AI, recommendations, automation) in a production SaaS platform, and using AI tools to boost personal and team productivity.
• Ability to evaluate AI capabilities pragmatically -- distinguishing genuine product value from hype, and making build-vs-buy calls on AI vendors and models.
• Understanding of the trade-offs specific to AI systems: cost, latency, data privacy, model reliability, and vendor lock-in.
• Ability to establish guardrails for responsible AI use, including data governance, security, and appropriate human oversight.
• Awareness of how AI coding and productivity tools are changing engineering workflows, and how to help teams adopt them effectively.

Respect for an existing platform

The platform is built primarily on Node.js/JavaScript and Java, running on AWS EKS. We are not looking for someone to come in with a technology agenda. This role is about governing and improving what we have, not replacing it.

Communication and leadership

• Able to communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership.
• Able to mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across teams without management authority.
• Deep experience with agile development practices.

Security and platform health

Responsible for ensuring the platform is:

• Secure -- built and maintained to industry and BIW security standards.
• Performant -- delivering fast, consistent user experiences.
• Observable -- instrumented with logging, tracing, and monitoring sufficient for proactive operation.

Base Salary Range: $180,000.00 to $220,000.00. The final salary and offer will be determined by the applicant's background, experience, and skills.

More details about our company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.biworldwide.com/careers/benefits-page/