Principal Software Architect

OPENTEXT - THE INFORMATION COMPANY

OpenText is a global leader in information management, where innovation, creativity, and collaboration are the key components of our corporate culture. As a member of our team, you will have the opportunity to partner with the most highly regarded companies in the world, tackle complex issues, and contribute to projects that shape the future of digital transformation.

AI-First. Future-Driven. Human-Centered.

At OpenText, AI is at the heart of everything we do—powering innovation, transforming work, and empowering digital knowledge workers. We're hiring talent that AI can't replace to help us shape the future of information management. Join us.

Your Impact

We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Software Architect to provide end-to-end architectural leadership for complex, AI-enabled enterprise products and programs. This role is accountable for defining the technical direction, governing critical architecture decisions, and ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, operable, and aligned with business outcomes.

The successful candidate will serve as the senior technical representative for the organization across engineering, product management, security, operations, data, and executive forums. The architect must communicate with authority, constructively challenge assumptions, and build support for sound technical decisions using evidence, prototypes, trade-off analysis, operational data, and clear business impact. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep technical expertise with enterprise influence and accountability.

What the role offers

- Own the target architecture and multi-year technical evolution for complex products or programs spanning multiple services, teams, integrations, data domains, and deployment environments.
- Lead architectural decision-making from problem framing through implementation, including options analysis, trade-offs, architecture decision records, non-functional requirements, technical risk acceptance, and validation of delivered outcomes.
- Define and govern AI architecture for production use cases, including generative AI, LLM-enabled workflows, agentic patterns, retrieval-augmented generation, model lifecycle, evaluation, observability, safety, privacy, and responsible AI controls.
- Partner with product and program leaders to convert business strategy into coherent platform capabilities, architecture roadmaps, sequencing decisions, investment choices, and measurable technical outcomes.
- Provide technical leadership across complex product and program teams, aligning engineering leads around clear principles, reference patterns, interfaces, and quality attributes while preserving appropriate team autonomy.
- Represent architecture and engineering positions in cross-functional governance and executive forums. Present recommendations clearly to peer architects, directors, VPs, and SVPs, address counterarguments objectively, and drive decisions to closure.
- Use prototypes, benchmarks, threat models, cost models, reliability data, and operational evidence to validate recommendations and demonstrate why a proposed direction is the best fit for the business and technology context.
- Anticipate systemic risks and architectural bottlenecks across scalability, security, compliance, data quality, interoperability, performance, resilience, cost, maintainability, and delivery execution; establish mitigation plans and decision triggers.
- Guide modernization of legacy capabilities toward cloud-native, API-first, event-driven, and AI-ready architectures without compromising customer continuity or operational stability.
- Establish architecture governance that is lightweight, traceable, and outcome-oriented, including design reviews, architecture fitness functions, technical standards, exception management, and conformance reviews.
- Influence engineering practices across teams, including secure design, automated testing, CI/CD, platform engineering, observability, performance engineering, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
- Mentor senior engineers, lead engineers, and architects; raise the quality of technical reasoning, design documentation, executive communication, and architecture ownership across the organization.
- Remain hands-on enough to review critical designs and code, build focused proofs of concept, investigate high-impact technical issues, and engage directly in complex problem solving when needed.

What you need to succeed

- Typically 16+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience leading architecture for large-scale enterprise products, platforms, or multi-team programs.
- Demonstrated accountability for architectural decisions with broad product, customer, operational, or organizational impact.
- Deep expertise in Java and modern backend architecture, including Spring, microservices, REST and asynchronous integration patterns. Strong working knowledge of C/C++ environments is valuable where product components require it.
- Strong applied AI experience delivering production capabilities using LLMs, generative AI, machine learning, or intelligent automation, with practical understanding of model selection, prompting, grounding, evaluation, guardrails, latency, cost, and lifecycle operations.
- Experience with AI/ML ecosystems and integration approaches such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, commercial model APIs, vector databases, embeddings, model gateways, and or LLMOps practices.
- Expert knowledge of distributed systems, domain-driven design, APIs, event-driven architecture, data architecture, messaging, concurrency, caching, persistence, and fault-tolerant design.
- Proven ability to design for enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, multi-tenancy, scalability, availability, disaster recovery, observability, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Advanced experience with at least one major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, plus containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, and modern platform engineering practices.
- Ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries, navigate disagreement constructively, and establish credibility with senior technical and business stakeholders.
- Exceptional written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to explain complex trade-offs in concise business language and confidently defend recommendations with executives.
- Strong judgment under ambiguity, with the ability to balance strategic architecture with delivery realities and make timely, reversible or irreversible decisions appropriately.

Dimension

P5 expectation

Architecture ownership

Sets direction, makes and documents consequential decisions, and remains accountable for architectural integrity through delivery and operation.

AI leadership

Defines production-grade AI patterns, evaluation criteria, controls, and adoption pathways that create measurable product value.

Program influence

Aligns multiple teams and functions around a coherent technical strategy, resolving cross-team dependencies and systemic risks.

Executive engagement

Frames technology choices in terms of customer, risk, investment, speed, and business outcomes for VP and SVP audiences.

Decision advocacy

Builds support through evidence and transparent trade-offs; challenges respectfully and drives decisions without relying on positional authority.

Technical depth

Moves fluently between enterprise architecture, system design, implementation constraints, operational behavior, and targeted hands-on validation.

Talent multiplier

Elevates architects and senior engineers through coaching, standards, reusable patterns, and stronger technical decision practices.

One last thing

- Experience architecting AI-enabled enterprise products in regulated, high-volume, B2B, integration, or mission-critical environments.
- Experience with agentic systems, RAG architectures, knowledge graphs, semantic search, AI-assisted automation, or predictive analytics.
- Experience establishing architecture review practices, technology standards, reference architectures, or platform strategies across a product portfolio.
- Background in performance engineering, threat modeling, data governance, FinOps, SRE, or large-scale modernization.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Equivalent advanced professional experience is also valued.
- Clear, adopted architecture direction that enables teams to deliver with fewer late-stage design reversals and unmanaged cross-team dependencies.
- Critical technical decisions are timely, evidence-based, traceable, and understood by engineering, product, program, and executive stakeholders.
- AI capabilities demonstrate measurable product value and meet defined standards for quality, safety, privacy, reliability, observability, and cost.
- Architecture risks are identified early, owned explicitly, and reduced through executable plans rather than documentation alone.
- Senior engineers and architects demonstrate stronger ownership, decision quality, and consistency through the candidate’s technical leadership and coaching.
- Shape the architecture of complex, AI-driven enterprise products with meaningful customer and business impact.
- Operate as a senior technical leader with direct influence across product, engineering, program, security, operations, and executive stakeholders.
- Build reusable platforms and technical capabilities that enable multiple teams and accelerate sustained product innovation.
- Work in a collaborative environment that values technical rigor, pragmatic decision-making, continuous learning, and accountable leadership.

OpenText's efforts to build an inclusive work environment go beyond simply complying with applicable laws. Our Employment Equity and Diversity Policy provides direction on maintaining a working environment that is inclusive of everyone, regardless of culture, national origin, race, color, gender, gender identification, sexual orientation, family status, age, veteran status, disability, religion, or other basis protected by applicable laws.

If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please contact us at [email protected] . Our proactive approach fosters collaboration, innovation, and personal growth, enriching OpenText's vibrant workplace.