Swiftkey logo

Principal Architect

Swiftkey

Redmond, WAJobPosted 1 day agoStill listed today

Most applications go out cold — see where you stand first. No sign-up to start.

You apply on the employer's site, with no Olive account needed.

Watch jobs like this.

Don't just apply. Show up ready.

Olive works from this exact posting.

At a glance

Compensation
No compensation found
Location
Redmond, WA
Work Authorization
Not specified

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

Defines the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for the Perception Platform, including production-grade AI capabilities, reusable platform abstractions, scalable RAG systems, tenant isolation, AI memory and state management, and operational observability. The role establishes architectural guardrails and patterns across engineering teams, and requires extensive experience with distributed systems, cloud platforms, generative AI, agentic systems, and enterprise security.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Distributed Systems ArchitectureMulti-Tenant ArchitectureEnterprise Platform ArchitectureCloud ArchitectureAI Systems ArchitectureReference ArchitecturePlatform StandardsTenant IsolationGenerative AIModel OrchestrationRetrieval-Augmented GenerationSemantic RetrievalMemory ManagementContext ManagementReasoningTool UseAI EvaluationGroundingAI SafetyAgentic SystemsMulti-Agent SystemsTask OrchestrationState ManagementPolicy EnforcementIdentity ManagementAuthenticationAuthorizationRole-Based Access ControlLeast PrivilegeDelegated AuthorizationWorkload IdentitiesService IdentitiesAgent IdentitiesEnterprise IntegrationAPI IntegrationKubernetesContainerized ServicesInfrastructure as CodeAutomated DeploymentCI/CD

Qualifications

Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or Related Technical FieldMaster's in Computer Science, Engineering, or Related Technical Field6+ Years Technical Engineering Experience8+ Years Technical Engineering Experience12+ Years Technical Engineering Experience

Full job description

  1. Define the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for the Perception Platform, establishing principles and reference architectures for production-grade AI capabilities spanning generative AI, retrieval, memory, reasoning, agent orchestration, model interaction, execution, evaluation, extensibility, security, and safety. Establish architectural principles, system boundaries, and reusable platform abstractions across compute, storage, networking, identity, configuration, deployment, observability, data, AI execution, and service integration that reduce architectural fragmentation and tenant-specific coupling. Establish architectural strategy for scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including ingestion, indexing, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, context construction, grounding, provenance, re-ranking, retrieval evaluation, data governance, and enforcement of tenant and authorization boundaries throughout retrieval workflows. Establish architectural guardrails that ensure tenant isolation and authorization are preserved end-to-end across retrieval, reasoning, planning, memory, and execution, including mechanisms for validating agent-generated plans and tool interactions against applicable security, authorization, safety, privacy, and compliance policies. Establish architectural approaches for AI memory and state management, including short-term and long-term memory, tenant and user isolation, authorization-aware retrieval, lifecycle management, retention, deletion, provenance, privacy, compliance, and safe reuse of contextual information. Establish observability, monitoring, diagnostics, and operational architecture that enables engineering teams to understand end-to-end platform health, identify systemic failures, distinguish platform-wide from tenant-specific issues, and efficiently troubleshoot distributed services and AI workflows. Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, cloud platforms, These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings: Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, or cloud platforms OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, or cloud platforms OR equivalent experience. Significant experience architecting large-scale distributed systems, multi-tenant services, enterprise platforms, cloud infrastructure, or AI-powered systems in production environments. Experience establishing reference architectures, architectural principles, platform standards, system boundaries, and reusable architectural patterns across multiple engineering teams or organizations. Experience designing architectures with strong tenant isolation across identity, authorization, data, compute, configuration, networking, and operational boundaries. Experience defining architecture for Generative AI systems, including model orchestration, RAG, semantic retrieval, memory, context management, reasoning, tool use, evaluation, grounding, safety, and production operationalization. Experience architecting agentic or multi-agent systems, including planning, tool invocation, task orchestration, memory, state management, delegation, agent-to-agent or agent-to-service communication, policy enforcement, and bounded autonomous execution. Deep understanding of identity, authentication, authorization, RBAC, least privilege, delegated authorization, workload identities, service identities, agent identities, and multi-tenant security boundaries. Experience defining secure architectural patterns for integrating AI systems with enterprise data, services, APIs, plugins, tools, and distributed execution environments. Experience designing Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures, including ingestion, indexing, embeddings, retrieval, re-ranking, provenance, grounding, authorization-aware retrieval, and evaluation. Experience with modern cloud architecture, including Kubernetes, containerized services, compute, storage, networking, service-to-service communication, configuration management, Infrastructure as Code, automated deployment, and CI/CD. Experience architecting highly available and resilient services, including approaches for dependency failure, capacity constraints, throttling, graceful degradation, fault isolation, recovery, and disaster scenarios. Experience defining observability, diagnostics, health monitoring, deployment validation, and operational architecture for large-scale distributed systems. Experience identifying architectural coupling and successfully evolving existing production systems toward modular, reusable, configurable, extensible, and scalable platform architectures. Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs involving security, reliability, scalability, performance, cost, operational complexity, developer productivity, and time-to-market. Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy and align engineering organizations around common architectural direction without requiring direct organizational authority. Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex architectures and tradeoffs clearly to engineering teams, architects, product leaders, security experts, and senior leadership. Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical leaders and raise architectural and engineering capabilities across an organization.

How this job compares

Set against the 1,491 open Software Architect jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 7, 2026.

Pay
  • This postingNot listed
  • Washington median$160–275K/yr28 salary ranges
Openings
Olive Jobs lists 31 open Software Architect jobs in Washington and 1,491 across the US. 22% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in Washington
Experience
Software Architect postings that state a minimum ask for 10 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 7 to 10 years (1,230 postings).
Education
521 of the 1,491 open Software Architect jobs (35%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 7, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

Prepare for this role

You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.