Technical skills
About this role
Principal Digital Architect
Diversified Services Network, Inc. (DSN) is seeking a full-time Principal Digital Architect to join our team in a fully remote capacity, with candidates required to live local to our Chicago, IL or Peoria, IL office locations. We offer full benefits, PTO, 401k, and more! If you're looking to grow your career within an extremely reputable, stable Fortune 100 company – let's talk!
Position Overview
As a Principal Digital Architect, you will own the end-to-end architecture for complex systems — balancing scalability, performance, security, and rapid delivery — while influencing enterprise technology strategy. This role requires strong technical depth, architectural judgment, and the ability to translate ambiguous business needs into durable, scalable solutions.
You will work alongside a team of 18 and partner closely with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams to ensure architectural alignment with business outcomes.
Typical Day or Week in the Role
- Own and define solution and platform architectures for large-scale, distributed systems from concept through production.
- Create architecture that meets high standards for scalability, performance, resilience, and security.
- Assess, select, and introduce new technologies, including proof-of-concept development and architectural spikes.
- Establish and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across platform teams.
- Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to engineering teams, ensuring high-quality implementation.
- Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
- Produce and maintain clear architecture documentation, including rationale and trade-offs.
- Continuously evolve platform architecture to improve developer productivity, system reliability, and cost efficiency.
Requirements
Candidate Requirements
- Education & Experience:
- Bachelor's degree with 5+ years of experience in this capacity.
Required Technical Skills
- Architectural Thinking: Ability to decompose complex problem spaces and develop pragmatic architecture options with clearly articulated trade-offs.
- Technical Leadership: Influence without authority; guide teams through architectural decisions and implementation challenges.
- Communication: Clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Requirements Analysis: Translate business and non-functional requirements into scalable technical designs.
- Platform & Application Architecture: Strong foundation in designing modern application and platform architectures using established patterns and standards.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience defining AI reference architectures and standards for enterprise adoption.
- Ability to explain and defend architectural trade-offs between classical ML, LLM-based approaches, and non-AI solutions.
- Proven experience taking AI systems from proof of concept to scaled production use.
- Strong programming background in Python and Java, with the ability to reason at the code level.
- Proven experience designing and building enterprise-scale, distributed systems.
- Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, including AWS services, containerization, and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Deep understanding of data architecture: SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehouses (Snowflake specifically), data modeling, replication, and sharding.
- Experience with modern DevOps practices: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and automated testing.
- Strong API design experience (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), including versioning and documentation.
- Ability to evaluate and introduce emerging technologies aligned to business goals.
AI-Related Skills
- Hands-on experience designing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, including:
- Data ingestion pipelines
- Document preprocessing and chunking strategies
- Vectorization and embedding models
- Query-time retrieval, ranking, and context assembly
- Deep understanding of embedding techniques, similarity search, and trade-offs across:
- Vector dimensions
- Chunk size and overlap
- Latency vs. recall vs. cost
- Experience with vector databases and search layers (managed or self-hosted) and their integration into application architectures.
- Experience with agentic frameworks.
- Ability to architect end-to-end AI workflows, including:
- Prompt design and prompt versioning
- Context management and memory patterns
- Model routing and fallback strategies
- Knowledge of LLM lifecycle considerations, including:
- Model selection (hosted vs. self-hosted)
- Fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. hybrid approaches
- Evaluation, monitoring, and drift detection
- Strong understanding of AI system non-functional requirements, including:
- Performance and latency optimization
- Cost controls and token efficiency
- Security, data privacy, and guardrails
- Experience integrating AI capabilities into existing enterprise platforms via APIs and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to assess, prototype, and productionize emerging AI technologies aligned to business use cases.
Benefits
- 401(k)
- Dental insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Disability insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Health insurance
- Health savings account
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Paid Holidays
Please follow the link to our website for a list of job openings in Engineering, IT, Project Management, and more! Open www.dsnworldwide.com
Salary expectations: 132,000-140,000 per annual