Principle Architect Engineering Lead in York

At StarCompliance, we build software that supports critical compliance needs for global clients. We rely on experienced engineering leaders not only to deliver high-quality services, system designs and code, but to help shape how all teams work and how systems evolve. We’re looking for a Principal Engineering Lead to play a lead role within our Architecture engineering team. This role is suited to highly capable lead engineers/architects who combine strong technical architecture expertise with sound decision making judgement at scale, a service mindset, and a collaborative approach. The role blends hands-on architectural depth with organisational leadership.

You will set the architectural direction, chair the Architecture Forum, and ensure that our systems are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective at scale. You will line-manage two Principal Architect Engineers and work closely with engineering, product, security, and operations leaders. This position requires strong technical authority, the ability to navigate complex stakeholder input, and the credibility to influence senior engineers and leaders across the organisation. How you work is critical. We value engineering leaders who communicate clearly, build trust, challenge ideas constructively, and take ownership not just of systems, but of outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the target software architecture for a distributed, multi-tenant SaaS platform operating at scale.
• Ensure the continued effective documentation of these systems, ensuring the catalogue is in a healthy state.
• Contribute to the wider organisations engineering teams design of highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable systems using modern distributed systems principles.
• Work closely with peers in Platform and Infrastructure to continue to evolve our service delivery practices.
• Ensure principles that are followed are turned into established re-usable patterns.
• Evolve our multi-tenant architecture patterns, including tenant isolation, data partitioning, security boundaries, and scalability models.
• Provide deep expertise in messaging and integration patterns (event-driven architectures, pub/sub, CQRS, eventual consistency, idempotency, etc.).
• Chair the Architecture forum, continuing to evolve our robust approach to complex decision making.
• Ensure architectural decisions balance performance, security, operability, cost, and developer productivity.
• Promote consistency without stifling autonomy, enabling teams to move fast on a well-defined platform foundation.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers, raising the overall architectural maturity of the organization.
• Work closely with engineering leadership to align architecture with delivery realities.

Skills and Experience

• Expert-level C# and .NET Core knowledge, with experience designing and evolving large-scale, microservices systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure, including core services, networking, identity, security, and platform services.
• Proven expertise in distributed systems design, including event-driven and message-based architectures, consistency models and trade-offs, failure modes, resilience patterns, and recovery strategies.
• Strong understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architectures, ideally in a production environment at scale.
• Strong knowledge of messaging technologies and patterns.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) is highly desirable.
• Familiarity with modern observability, monitoring, and operational tooling.

Minimum Qualifications

• Typically 10+ years of commercial software development experience with at least several years of these in a multi-tenant, cloud hosted organization.
• Experience working with enterprise-scale SaaS platforms.
• Relevant certificates are a plus, but not essential.
• Right to work in the country of employment.