Principal Solution Architect, Platform Engineering, SRE

Job Description

About the role

Reporting to the Head of Architecture for Platform Engineering, the Principal Solution Architect plays a crucial role in designing and delivering enterprise platform capabilities. Platform Engineering is chartered to deliver the shared capabilities that product engineering teams use to deliver secure, reliable, performant, high-quality products to clients faster.

Platform Engineering’s portfolio spans AI Engineering, API & Event Management, Front End, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Developer Experience & Quality, and Customer Identity & Access Management.

This role’s primary focus is SRE: architecting the reliability, observability, and incident management capabilities that allow engineering teams to operate their products with confidence at scale. Like every architect on the team, you will also contribute across all platform domains and may lead initiatives in any of them, so broad, enterprise-level platform thinking is as essential as SRE depth.

What you will be doing

You will make a significant impact on the company’s modernization and transformation journey by designing, documenting, and driving adoption of modern engineering patterns for next-generation platform capabilities and the ways product teams consume them.

In SRE, your focus spans the full reliability lifecycle, from designing for reliability and defining service level objectives, through observability and incident response, to learning from failure and eliminating operational toil, wherever infrastructure, application stacks, and operations intersect.

You will draw on significant hands-on software engineering experience in product delivery to turn complex business needs into thoughtful, practical solutions.

You will bring cloud-native patterns to our platforms, build roadmaps that clearly sequence the steps of our modernization journey, and apply enterprise architecture practices such as governance, ecosystem analysis, and vendor evaluation, while providing thought leadership on what is possible as we transform engineering culture at FIS. Specifically, you will be responsible for:

• Contributing platform thinking and subject matter expertise across all platform domains, applying modern engineering and architectural patterns to design systems (APIs, services, events, data, UI, and supporting capabilities) that enable engineering teams to deliver product capabilities rapidly
• Creating and communicating best-practice target-state designs that use cloud-native patterns and are easy for engineering teams to consume, supported by clear artifacts such as business case and process context, context and sequence diagrams, and architecture decision records
• Leading the architecture and roadmap for SRE platform capabilities, including observability built on open standards such as OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, traces, real user and synthetic monitoring, and cost-aware telemetry pipelines), SLO-based alerting, AIOps and event correlation, incident response and on-call tooling, and runbook automation and self-healing that reduce toil
• Embedding reliability into the paved paths product teams consume, including service level indicators, objectives, and error budgets; resilience patterns such as redundancy, graceful degradation, and failover; production readiness reviews; safe change practices such as progressive delivery and automated rollback; chaos and disaster recovery testing against defined recovery objectives; and blameless post-incident reviews that drive measurable improvement
• Partnering with leaders across the Platform Engineering organization to introduce, socialize, and champion modernization of front-end, middle-tier, and back-end technology stacks within an AI-first delivery model
• Leading evaluations of new and existing vendors for fit with Platform Engineering’s strategy, technology approach, and integration patterns
• Defining and driving adoption of integration patterns across internal systems, services, and capabilities so that quality data, events, and services are available for consumption regardless of channel
• Partnering with platform owners, product partners, and other stakeholders on the intake and evaluation of platform capabilities and features, influencing design decisions and approaches before execution and delivery begin
• Validating designs through hands-on proofs of concept and reference implementations, and contributing to architecture reviews and governance across the team
• Articulating the business value of the architectural roadmap, including fact-based “over the horizon” perspectives with options and trade-offs that align to the broader business and engineering strategy

What you will need

• 10+ years of solution architecture and senior software engineering experience, including significant hands-on product delivery, in a fast-paced, global software delivery organization that operates with ambiguity
• Expert understanding of software and internet architecture, including modern front-end and back-end stacks, API management and identity and access management, cloud-native and on-premises infrastructure (containers,
• Kubernetes, infrastructure as code), networking and internet connectivity, and browser and mobile application delivery

• Deep expertise designing and delivering modern SRE capabilities, including SLO and error-budget practices, observability and telemetry architecture, AIOps, incident management and root cause analysis, resilience and disaster recovery design, and the engineering team interfaces needed for effective cross-team issue resolution

• Strong understanding of how IAM, security, and network policies inherited by engineering teams affect the reliability, operability, and troubleshooting of their services

• Demonstrated track record of delivering platform capabilities that power consumer-facing software products, especially API- and event-driven systems

• Deep experience adopting and operating within a modern SDLC and engineering practice (AI-enabled development, DevSecOps, and platform-as-a-product)

• Thorough understanding of modern information security and data protection practices and how to apply them across technology stacks in regulated environments

• Collaborative, low-ego approach focused on business outcomes, with the ability to motivate and energize others and influence without authority to achieve common goals

• Exceptional communicator who can navigate and influence at every level of the organization, tailoring the message to any audience to achieve the desired outcome

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries, including operational resilience requirements and how they shape architecture decisions
• Hands-on experience with commercial and open-source observability, AIOps, and incident management platforms at enterprise scale
• Experience applying reliability and observability practices to AI and LLM-based systems, including agentic workloads
• Undergraduate degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or another technical field preferred, but not required

Personal characteristics

• Demonstrates sound judgment and flexibility, thinking comprehensively about issues and developing solutions that account for the broader context and strategy
• Maintains a positive, adaptable approach to rapidly shifting priorities, topics, and environments
• Takes initiative, translating strategy into action and driving delivery with a “roll up the sleeves” approach
• Remains calm and structured under pressure, bringing clarity to high-stakes situations such as major incidents and critical decisions
• Builds strong relationships and negotiates effectively with internal and external stakeholders, grounding decisions in data
• Combines intellectual curiosity and a drive for excellence with a track record of success and a reputation as someone others enjoy working with
• Brings strong attention to detail, a commitment to adopting and implementing best practices, and a bias toward continuous improvement
• Embodies and delivers the firm’s values and culture towards colleagues, clients, and communities:

Win as one team

Lead with integrity

Be the change

Privacy Statement

FIS is committed to protecting the privacy and security of all personal information that we process in order to provide services to our clients. For specific information on how FIS protects personal information online, please see the Online Privacy Notice.

EEOC Statement

FIS is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, genetic information, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. The EEO is the Law poster is available here supplement document available here

For positions located in the US, the following conditions apply. If you are made a conditional offer of employment, you will be required to undergo a drug test. ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Sourcing Model

Recruitment at FIS works primarily on a direct sourcing model; a relatively small portion of our hiring is through recruitment agencies. FIS does not accept resumes from recruitment agencies which are not on the preferred supplier list and is not responsible for any related fees for resumes submitted to job postings, our employees, or any other part of our company.

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