Principal Engineer Architect

About the Company

Our client is an international, fast-growing direct-to-consumer company undergoing a major Digital & AI transformation. They are building a brand-new Digital & AI division focused on creating next-generation customer experiences across web and mobile platforms.

The engineering organization operates as a small, high-impact, agentic-native team, where AI-powered workflows are embedded into every stage of software development.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Principal Engineer – Architect to become the most senior engineering leader within the Digital & AI organization.

This person will own the end-to-end architecture of the customer-facing platform, defining the technical vision across web, mobile, backend services and enterprise integrations.

This is a highly hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys designing long-term architecture while remaining deeply involved in coding, technical reviews and solving complex engineering challenges.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture Ownership

· Own the end-to-end architecture of the customer-facing digital platform.

· Define the target architecture across frontend, backend and integration layers.

· Establish architectural standards, best practices and technical governance.

· Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and define integration strategies for third-party solutions.

· Ensure scalability, maintainability and long-term technical sustainability.

• Hands-on Technical Leadership

· Write production-quality code when required.

· Prototype new capabilities and unblock complex technical challenges.

· Design applications end-to-end from scratch.

· Review architecture, code and technical decisions across engineering teams.

· Improve platform performance, scalability, security and reliability.

• Cross-Functional Leadership

· Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Data, Marketing and Operations teams.

· Translate business objectives into technical strategy.

· Communicate technical decisions effectively to executive stakeholders.

· Mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering standards across the organization.

· Foster collaboration across distributed international teams.

• Agentic AI Leadership

· Drive the adoption of agentic AI workflows across the engineering organization.

· Define standards, tooling and governance for AI-assisted software development.

· Establish human-in-the-loop quality and security practices.

· Continuously identify opportunities where AI agents can increase engineering productivity.

• Enterprise Systems Integration

· Design integrations between customer-facing applications and enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, PIM, Partner Management, CMS and Compensation Management systems).

· Ensure reliable and observable data, pricing, catalog, identity and order flows across the platform.

Required Experience

· 12+ years of software engineering experience.

· Experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Software Architect or equivalent.

· Experience architecting large-scale customer-facing web and mobile platforms.

· Hands-on expertise with React, Next.js and React Native.

· Strong knowledge of REST APIs, GraphQL, Event-Driven Architecture, API Gateways, BFF and service orchestration.

· Experience designing scalable backend services and distributed systems.

· Experience integrating enterprise applications and third-party SaaS platforms.

· Cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure or GCP), containers and CI/CD.

· Experience mentoring senior engineers.

· Fluent English required. Spanish is a plus.

Preferred Background

· E-commerce

· Marketplace platforms

· Consumer-facing digital products

· International technology organizations

· AI/ML-enabled customer experiences

· Large-scale digital platforms

Soft Skills

· Strong technical leadership.

· Strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

· Excellent communication skills.

· High ownership and accountability.

· Ability to work effectively in distributed international teams.

· Comfort operating in fast-changing, ambiguous environments.

· Passion for mentoring and growing engineering organizations.

What Makes This Opportunity Different

· Opportunity to architect a greenfield digital platform from scratch.

· Significant influence over the company's long-term technical strategy.

· Small, highly talented engineering team with substantial autonomy.

· Heavy adoption of AI-native engineering workflows.

· International environment with direct business impact at large consumer scale.

· High level of ownership, technical freedom and decision-making authority.