Principal Software Architect at Abacus Insights in United States

Job description

• Abacus is scaling fast – more Data Solutions applications, more agent-assisted engineering, more complexity worth getting right. We're creating this role to put a single, senior technical voice at the center of that growth: someone who can take sharp architectural judgment and turn it into standards the whole organization can build on with confidence.
• We're looking for an experienced Principal Software Architect to set the technical vision for how Abacus builds, secures, and scales its healthcare data platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a management track – you'll be the architecture guru and evangelist for our platform, translating business and customer needs into target-state architectures across data, applications, cloud, and agent-assisted engineering, and mentoring engineers and Solution Architects as you go.
• You'll build the reusable application foundation – design system, application blueprints, integration contracts, and production-readiness gates – that lets Data Solutions applications move fast without reinventing the wheel every time. And as agent-driven development becomes a bigger part of how we ship, you'll be the one turning architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that let AI-assisted output meet the same bar as our best human-written code – putting you at the center of how Abacus builds software for years to come.
• You'll bring enough depth to guide decisions across data, application, integration, cloud, and agentic development, while staying pragmatic about fit-for-purpose architecture and delivery constraints. You won't do it alone – you'll partner closely with Product Engineering, our XPORT Principal Engineering team, AI Engineering, Security, and Client Solutions, bringing architecture to life from concept through production, not just on a whiteboard.
• In your first 6–12 months, you'll leave a clear mark on how Abacus builds software:
• Deliver a reference architecture for Data Solutions applications that teams adopt from day one – a shared blueprint, design system, API/data contracts, and starter implementations that let new work move faster instead of starting from scratch.
• Stand up the skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that let our ADD Harness and agent-assisted workflows produce work that meets our architectural bar – a foundation that scales with the team, not just with you.
• Build the architecture decision records, non-functional requirements, and operational-readiness checklists that give every release clear evidence it's production-ready – deployment, observability, support, and rollback accounted for before go-live.
• Grow architecture capability across the team through pairing, reviews, and ownership handoffs – leaving Abacus with more senior architectural judgment than it had when you started, not just your own.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the reference architecture for Abacus's core platform – data ingestion, transformation, distribution, and serving – partnering with teams where ingestion and distribution ownership is shared, and with Product Engineering on application and service layers.
• Set and enforce architecture standards for scaling, high availability/disaster recovery design, serverless patterns, and multi-tenant SaaS architecture across our AWS and Azure environments.
• Guide architecture for HITRUST and GovRamp compliance alignment, partnering with Security and Compliance so designs meet audit and control expectations from the outset rather than as an afterthought.
• Healthcare data and platform architecture
• Design scalable architectures for payer data solutions spanning claims, membership, provider, clinical, lab, and pharmacy/Rx domains, and their analytical and operational serving layers.
• Apply FHIR-based interoperability patterns and healthcare data standards where relevant to product or client implementations.
• Establish data contracts, lineage, quality controls, metadata, and integration patterns across ingestion, transformation, and serving layers.
• Application architecture and user experience foundation
• Own the design system and front-end/UX standards for Data Solutions applications, partnering with UX/Design on accessibility, branding, and consistent interaction patterns.
• Define standard user-management capabilities – tenant setup, roles, permissions, and admin experiences – as reusable patterns instead of something each team reinvents.
• Agent-driven development and AI-enabled engineering
• Translate approved architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that our ADD Harness and agent-assisted development workflows can consume directly.
• Evaluate agent-generated code and designs against architectural gold standards, and build the scoring and review mechanisms that let us scale the quality of agent-produced merge requests across engineering teams.
• Partner with AI Engineering on semantic/context layers, agent interfaces (MCP and A2A), retrieval patterns, AI gateways, evaluation, traceability, and governed model access.
• Architecture governance, mentoring, and influence
• Be an active senior member and contributor to Abacus's Architecture and Data Guilds – introducing ideas, taking them to realization, and helping drive a culture of innovation through hackathons and beyond.
• Mentor engineers and Solution Architects through pairing on designs, reviews, and pilots, growing architectural capability across the team rather than concentrating it in one person.
• Establish lightweight architecture review mechanisms that protect critical standards without slowing delivery, measuring adoption through signals like reuse, exception volume, and escaped design defects.
• Production readiness and operability
• Ensure every architecture package includes deployment topology, support model, rollback strategy, and operational telemetry, partnering with DevOps/Platform and Security on CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability. Help to establish quality metrics like DORA
• Hold designs to a resiliency bar appropriate for a platform of Abacus's scale, and help teams reason through trade-offs between delivery speed and operational risk.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in senior architecture roles designing and guiding complex cloud, data, integration, and application solutions from discovery through production operation.
• Demonstrated experience setting enterprise-level architecture standards and mentoring engineers or architects without formal management authority – Principal-level IC leadership, not a people-management track.
• Deep, hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), including containers, Kubernetes, Git-based CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), observability, and secure production operations.
• Strong experience with data platforms and distributed data processing (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Spark) and with modern application and service architectures (Python, API-first services, React/TypeScript front-ends), identity and authorization, and multi-tenant SaaS patterns.
• Working knowledge of agentic and AI-enabled engineering – LLM-enabled applications, MCP/A2A , LangGraph or comparable orchestration, AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., Cursor), Agent Driven Development and Harnesses retrieval/context patterns, evaluation, and responsible AI controls.
• Understanding of healthcare payer, provider, clinical, and claims data ecosystems, or the ability to ramp quickly in a regulated data domain.
• Familiarity with HITRUST, GovRamp, or comparable compliance and control frameworks, and the ability to design for privacy, least privilege, auditability, and secure SDLC.
• Excellent communication skills – able to align senior business and technical stakeholders, explain trade-offs, and produce clear architecture artifacts for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Direct experience building or maintaining reference architectures, design systems, or developer platforms used by multiple teams.
• Experience defining architecture standards, rules, or evaluation rubrics for AI- or agent-assisted development workflows.
• Experience with FHIR-based interoperability or other healthcare data exchange standards.

Skills

Required

• Cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure)
• Containers
• Kubernetes
• Git-based CI/CD
• Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform)
• Observability
• Secure production operations
• Identity and authorization
• Multi-tenant SaaS patterns
• Excellent communication skills

Benefits

• Unlimited paid time off – recharge when you need it
• Work from anywhere – flexibility to fit your life
• Comprehensive health coverage – multiple plan options to choose from
• Equity for every employee – share in our success
• Growth-focused environment – your development matters here
• Home office setup allowance – one-time support to get you started
• Monthly cell phone allowance – stay connected with ease
• Compensation: Compensation for this role is based on experience, skills, and location, and includes base salary plus eligibility for performance bonuses and equity grants.