Principal Architect

We are looking for a Principal Architect for our core platform who combines deep technical architecture skills with a strong grasp of LeadSquared's technology, product, and business landscape. This is a senior individual-contributor role reporting directly to the CTO, built around technical ownership and influence.

You will own the target-state architecture of the core platform: defining where it needs to go to support the future direction of our products and business, and charting a credible, phased path to get there. Just as importantly, you will be a magnet and mentor for our most talented senior engineers, raising the technical bar across the organization and giving high-potential IC talent a compelling reason to grow and stay at LeadSquared.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Platform and Technical Strategy:

• Build and maintain a deep working understanding of LeadSquared's technology stack, product portfolio, and the business/customer landscape across BFSI, Education, Healthcare, and Marketplaces.
• Define and drive the target-state architecture for the core platform, covering scalability, multi-tenancy, extensibility, performance, security, OST, and data architecture.
• Translate the future direction of product and business, including emerging AI-native and agentic capabilities, into a coherent, sequenced architecture roadmap.
• Establish architectural principles, standards, and guardrails across services, APIs, data, and integration layers, and ensure they are consistently applied.
• Evaluate new technologies, platforms, and patterns (cloud-native, data, and AI/agentic where relevant) that keep the platform future-ready and competitively differentiated.
• Make and own architectural trade-off calls that balance paying down technical debt against the pace of new capability delivery.

Cross-Functional and Business Alignment:

• Partner closely with the CTO, engineering and product leadership, and business stakeholders to keep platform architecture aligned with product strategy and market direction.
• Represent core platform architecture in leadership forums, bringing a technical lens to business and product decisions.
• Assess build-vs-buy, platform consolidation, and modernization choices through a business-outcomes lens, not just a technical one.
• Engage with customers and internal stakeholders as needed to validate that architectural direction holds up against real-world use cases.

Talent Development and Mentorship:

• Inspire and mentor senior engineers, tech leads, and architects across the organization, raising the overall quality of technical thinking and decision-making.
• Build structured mechanisms for coaching and knowledge-sharing: design reviews, architecture forums/guilds, and RFC and ADR processes that scale good architectural practice beyond any one team.
• Act as a magnet for senior IC talent: create a visible, credible technical growth path that improves engagement and retention of high-potential engineers.
• Champion engineering best practices design reviews, architecture decision records, documentation, and code quality as habits, not one-off exercises.

Hands-On Technical Leadership:

• Stay hands-on: prototype, review designs and code, and work directly alongside teams on the platform's hardest problems.
• Lead resolution of the most complex, cross-cutting architectural challenges such as scale, reliability, data consistency, and security.
• Set up lightweight governance (architecture review forums, a technology radar) that keeps the platform coherent as teams and services multiply.

The core requirements for the job include the following:

Technical Background:

• 14-20 years of overall software engineering experience, with a significant and recent track record in architecture and technical leadership roles on large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Proven experience owning target-state or reference architecture for a platform of meaningful scale and complexity.
• Strong, credible hands-on background across modern technology stacks (e. g., Java/. NET, cloud-native services, microservices, distributed systems) deep enough to earn the respect of senior engineers.
• Solid understanding of database technologies (SQL and NoSQL) and system design trade-offs at scale.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and cloud-native architecture practices.
• Familiarity with AI/ML and agentic architecture patterns (e. g., RAG, LLM orchestration, vector search) is a strong plus, given LeadSquared's growing AI-native roadmap.

Leadership and Influence:

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate senior engineers and architects without formal reporting authority, leading through influence and credibility.
• Excellent communication skills; able to explain architectural rationale clearly to the CTO, business leaders, and, where needed, customers.
• Strong stakeholder management, able to balance the sometimes-competing needs of product, business, and engineering.
• Genuine interest in coaching and teaching, with a track record of building technical culture that improves the quality and retention of senior talent.