Principal Application Architect

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the worlds leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. Youll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBMs product and technology landscape. Here, youll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

As an Application Architect, you will design applications that automate business processes and meet business needs, resulting in designs that may run on multiple platforms and comprise multiple software packages and custom components.

You will define best practices in the critical evaluation and selection of software components, hardware requirements, and development methods. Your primary responsibilities will include:

Design Applications: Define and develop comprehensive application designs that meet business requirements, ensuring quality, performance, availability, scalability, and integrity.

Evaluate and Select Components: Critically evaluate and select software components, hardware requirements, and development methods, defining best practices for application development.

Ensure Application Usability: Develop functional interfaces to applications, ensuring usability and seamless user experience.

Define Development Processes: Establish development processes, best practices, and tools to ensure efficient and effective application development.

Ensure Quality and Performance: Oversee application-related quality, performance, availability, scalability, and integrity, driving excellence in application architecture.

Required technical and professional expertise

• Deep Expertise in Data Cloud Architecture: Proven experience designing comprehensive data cloud solutions that unify, govern, and activate enterprise data across business processes, with a strong understanding of data quality, performance, availability, scalability, and integrity considerations across ingestion, storage, transformation, and consumption layers.

• Critical Evaluation and Selection: Deep expertise in critically evaluating and selecting data platform components, compute and storage architectures, integration patterns (ETL/ELT, streaming, CDC, reverse ETL), and modeling methodologies, with a proven track record of defining best practices for data cloud implementation.

• Technical Leadership in Data Engineering Processes: Experience establishing data development processes, governance frameworks, and tooling (orchestration, observability, lineage, catalog) to ensure efficient and effective data product delivery, with a focus on driving excellence in data architecture and platform engineering.

• Mastery of Data Consumption and Activation: Proven experience developing semantic layers, data products, and self-service interfaces that ensure usability and seamless analyst, business, and downstream system experience, with a strong understanding of data contracts, schema design, and consumer-centric modeling principles.

• Enterprise Vision for Data Trust and Performance: Deep expertise in overseeing data quality, performance, availability, scalability, and integrity across the platform, with a proven ability to drive strategic decision-making and shape the enterprise vision for data cloud architecture, governance, and value realization.

Preferred technical and professional experience

Advanced Technical Knowledge: Deep expertise in emerging technologies, programming languages, and software development methodologies, with the ability to apply this knowledge to drive innovation and excellence in application architecture.

Cross-Domain Expertise: Experience working across multiple domains, industries, or technical areas, with the ability to integrate knowledge and drive strategic decision-making in application architecture.

Enterprise Architecture: Deep understanding of enterprise architecture principles, frameworks, and best practices, with the ability to shape the enterprise vision for application architecture and drive strategic alignment.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.