Role: Principal Architect

Reports to: Global Head of Technology (SVP Engineering)
Function: Platform & Product Architecture (Cloud-Native Data/SaaS)

About Reltio

At Reltio®, an SAP Company, we believe data should fuel your success in the enterprise AI era. Our Context Intelligence Platform turns fragmented data into a trusted, connected context so AI agents and systems can act with expert-level judgement at enterprise scale. Reltio’s cloud-native SaaS platform harmonizes, unifies, and governs data across sources and formats—including unstructured data—in real time, turning them into data assets that can be mobilized in milliseconds to any application, user, or AI agent. Trusted by more than 200 of the world’s largest brands across industries such as life sciences, financial services, healthcare, and technology, we fuel frictionless operations and help enterprises accelerate innovation and reduce risk.

At Reltio, our values guide everything we do. With an unyielding commitment to prioritizing our “Customer First”, we strive to ensure their success. We embrace our differences and are “Better Together” as One Reltio. We are always looking to “Simplify and Share” our knowledge when we collaborate to remove obstacles for each other. We hold ourselves accountable for our actions and outcomes and strive for excellence. We “Own It”. Every day, we innovate and evolve, so that today is “Always Better Than Yesterday”. If you share and embody these values, we invite you to join our team at Reltio and contribute to our mission of excellence.

Reltio has earned numerous awards and industry and analyst recognition for our technology, our culture and our people. Reltio was founded on a distributed workforce and offers flexible work arrangements to help our people manage their personal and professional lives. If you’re ready to work on unrivaled technology where your desire to be part of a collaborative team is met with a laser-focused mission to enable digital transformation with connected data, let’s talk!

Job overview

Reltio is scaling a cloud-native, multi-tenant data platform used by global enterprises. We need a Principal Architect to set the end-to-end architecture vision, de-risk the roadmap, and turn strategy into secure, reliable, cost-efficient systems—while upleveling the engineering organization.

Enterprise & Product Architecture: Define the north-star architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS data platform (ingest → processing → storage → query → API/SDK/UX). Establish reference architectures, decision records, and standards.
Cloud-Native Platform: Drive container orchestration, service mesh, control planes, observability, and resilience across AWS/Azure/GCP.
Data & Streaming: Lead designs for high-volume streaming, low-latency query, and analytical/ML use cases (batch + real-time).
AI/ML & Agentic AI: Partner with product and security to embed responsible LLM/agentic patterns (guardrails, retrieval, evals) into customer-facing and internal developer workflows.
Reliability, Security & Compliance: Champion SRE/SOC2/ISO/GDPR-by-design, error budgets, threat modeling, and secure SDLC.
Developer Experience: Improve CI/CD, test strategy, paved roads, and golden paths; reduce cognitive load and toil across teams.
Executive & Customer Influence: Translate architecture trade-offs for executives and key customers; guide buy-build-integrate decisions.

Key Responsibilities

Set the vision: Author and socialize the product/platform architecture strategy; maintain ADRs and tech radars.

Design at scale: Lead designs for multi-tenant isolation, data models, schemas, indexing/OLAP, and event-driven systems.
Evolve the platform: Standardize service meshes, API gateways, policy-as-code, and multi-cloud deployment patterns.
Operational excellence: Embed SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident learning), capacity planning, and chaos testing.
Security & privacy: Lead threat models, data classification, encryption, secrets, key management, and SBOM/SLSA controls.
AI architecture: Define patterns for RAG/agents, prompt & model governance, telemetry, evaluations, and fallbacks.
Mentor & scale: Coach Staff/Principal engineers and architects; chair architecture reviews; build a healthy review culture.
Executive partnering: Communicate options/trade-offs to C-suite; align decisions with business value and customer impact.
Customer evangelism: Join key enterprise conversations; convert requirements into pragmatic designs and phased delivery.

Qualifications

20+ years in product/platform architecture for large-scale, cloud-native SaaS; recent Principal/Distinguished Architect scope leading end-to-end product decisions and migrations across multi-cloud.
Cloud & Kubernetes depth: EKS/AKS/GKE; service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), observability (Prometheus/Grafana), platform control planes, operators/CRDs. Able to define golden paths/paved roads for teams.
Data platform & streaming expertise: Kafka/Flink/Spark; columnar/OLAP (Druid, ClickHouse), NoSQL (Cassandra), search (Elasticsearch/Opensearch); real-time + batch patterns.
Microservices & integration at enterprise scale: API gateways, event-driven design, SOA/EAI (Apache Camel/Mule/WSO2/JBoss Fuse).
AI/ML & Agentic AI in production: ML pipelines (MLflow/Kubeflow/Airflow) and LLM/agent frameworks (OpenAI APIs, LLaMA, LangChain/LangGraph; tool-use, memory, evals).
Security, privacy, and compliance by design: threat modeling, data classification, encryption/keys, and EU GDPR awareness through real product work.
Executive communication & customer leadership: converts complex trade-offs into simple choices; partners with CXO/stakeholders globally; architecture evangelism with customers.
C-suite influence & decision facilitation: runs architecture reviews/SteerCos with crisp options, risk/ROI framing, and written decision records; pre-wires global stakeholders to land decisions quickly.
Customer-back product thinking: meets enterprises regularly, translates requirements into phased designs (MVP → scale), and defends non-negotiables (SLOs, security, privacy).
Cross-geo orchestration: proven delivery across US/EU/India time zones; builds async rituals, documentation standards, and handoff mechanisms that raise velocity and quality.
Culture carrier & coaching: uplevels Staff/Principal engineers, codifies paved roads (CI/CD, testing, observability), and scales architectural patterns via ADRs/radars.

Preferred Qualifications

Multi-cloud platform stewardship: proven ownership of cross-cloud platforms (e.g., control planes, observability, incident management) and data lake stacks, shipped to enterprise customers.
Cost/performance engineering: track record reducing infra cost per tenant and improving p95/p99 latency/MTTR via capacity planning, workload placement, and autoscaling patterns.
Programming fluency: Java/Scala/Python/Go/Rust for credible code-review and reference implementations.
OSS & ecosystem contribution: prior contributions to relevant frameworks (e.g., Hadoop tuning, NoSQL ORM, Camel/Keycloak) a plus.

Reltio is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Reltio is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.