Principal Lead

Job Description

Role Mission:

• Define and drive the enterprise middleware strategy aligned to business goals, cloud adoption, API-first architecture, and integration modernization.

• Set architectural standards, design patterns, and best practices across APIs, integration, messaging, and event platforms ensure solutions are scalable, secure, and resilient.

• Ensure high availability, observability, performance, and operational readiness of middleware platforms in production, meeting SLAs for mission-critical systems.

• Lead modernization initiatives (legacy to cloud, monolith to microservices, on-prem to Kubernetes), evaluatenew technologies, and continuously improve platform capabilities.

• Coach architects and engineers, influence cross-functional teams, and work closely with business, security, infrastructure, and vendors to deliver high-impact integration outcomes.

Accountabilities:

1. Middleware Platform Ownership

1. Architecture Governance & Standards

1. Delivery & Operational Excellence

1. Transformation & Modernization Execution

1. People, Stakeholder & Vendor Leadership

Responsibilities:

1. Lead the design, review, and approval of middleware solutions, ensuring compliance with enterprise architecture, security standards, and non-functional requirements.

1. Work closely with delivery teams to plan, prioritize, and execute API, integration, and messaging initiatives,providinghands-on guidance for complex or high-risk implementations.

1. Oversee production readiness, capacity planning, DR strategies, and support models act as the highest technical escalation point for middleware incidents and issues.

1. Assess middleware products, cloud services, and open-source technologies provide recommendations for adoption, replacement, or optimization based on cost, risk, and scalability.

1. Establish best practices forDevSecOps, CI/CD, automation, documentation, and knowledge sharing coach teams to improve engineering maturity and delivery consistency.

Team Scope/ Stakeholders:

1. Provide technical leadership and direction to middleware engineers, senior engineers, and solution architects across multiple delivery squads and platforms.

1. Collaborate closely with Enterprise Architecture, Application Development, Cloud & Infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, Security, and Network teams to deliver integrated, end-to-end solutions.

1. Work with L2/L3 support, NOC, and ITSM teams to ensure operational readiness, incident resolution, root cause analysis, and continuous service improvement.

MinimumProfile/Track Record:

1. 812+ years of experience in enterprise middleware, integration, or platform engineering roles, with at least 5+ years in a senior technical leadership or principal architect capacity.

1. Proventrack recordof designing and running large-scale middleware platforms covering API management, ESB/integration, messaging, and event-driven architectures in complex, high-volume environments.

1. Demonstrated success leading legacy-to-cloud migrations, monolith to microservices transitions, and middleware modernization initiatives using cloud-native and container-basedplatforms.