Principal Architect
IT
Atlanta, GA, USA
USD 196,500-294,750 / year + Equity
Posted on Oct 3, 2026
Strength in Trust
OneTrust’s mission is to enable innovation through the responsible use of data and AI. We believe that ensuring data is trusted shouldn’t slow teams down—it should accelerate what’s possible. This led us to develop the first technology platform for responsible data use in 2016. Today, with AI representing the latest and most impactful expansion of data yet, OneTrust is once again redefining what responsible innovation looks like. OneTrust, the AI‑Ready Governance Platform™, unifies regulatory intelligence, automation, and connected governance workflows so businesses can continue to move at the speed of AI while ensuring good governance to prevent data misuse at scale. Trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, OneTrust is shaping the future where trusted data becomes a transformative force for business and society. The Challenge
We're looking for a Principal Architect to set technical direction across OneTrust's product platform as part of Architecture Services, our central architecture team. Principal Architects are among the most senior individual-contributor technologists in R&D. They shape multi-year architecture strategy, work across product domains on problems no single team can solve alone, and represent architecture in the most consequential technical decisions facing R&D. Your Mission
Architecture Strategy & Technical Direction- Lead the multi-year architecture strategy across OneTrust's product domains, working with domain architects to align their technical plans into one platform direction.
- Lead resolution of cross-domain architectural challenges and align stakeholders on platform-wide technical direction.
- Set direction for the platform's non-functional requirements, including security, privacy, reliability, performance, scalability, and cost.
- Take part early in product discovery and roadmap planning to assess feasibility and identify risks before designs are final.
- Propose R&D-wide architecture standards, reference architectures, and patterns to the Architecture Guild, which owns and adopts them.
- Guide the design documentation process, and apply governance that doesn't block delivery wherever possible.
- Turn standards, reference architectures, and decision records into machine-readable context that AI coding agents use to follow our patterns.
- Build and guide the adoption of automated architectural checks, such as fitness functions, architecture-as-code, and AI-assisted design review.
- Build feedback loops that turn design decisions, review findings, and incident lessons into reusable context and patterns for future work.
- Design standards and agent context that work across tools, and back them with evals that catch regressions against our architectural standards. Help teams keep their delivery gains through tool changes and failed experiments.
- Stay hands-on with prototypes, reference implementations, and design work. Use AI agents to draft and test designs, explore trade-offs, and shorten feasibility work from weeks to days. Maintains technical credibility and leadership through prototypes, reference implementations, architecture automation, and hands-on experimentation.
- Develop domain and squad architects through mentoring and design coaching, and help define how architects grow in scope and influence at OneTrust.
- Support R&D's Guilds, including the Architecture and AI Enablement Guilds, as centers of excellence that own and evolve engineering standards. Provide the structure, facilitation, and hands-on help they need to define, pilot, and roll out those standards.
- Lead the Architecture Guild as a community of practice through regular forums, design clinics, and retrospectives that share knowledge and bring systemic problems to light.
- Define architecture scorecards for system health and standards adoption, and work with Developer Experience to build scorecards, templates, and catalog ownership into the developer workflow.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, and UX leadership on R&D's key technical decisions, and represent architecture in executive forums.
- Advise leadership on trade-offs in cost, risk, and delivery speed, and make the business case for architecture investments.
You Are
A senior technical leader responsible for architecture direction across multiple domains. You think strategically, you're equally credible with engineers and executives, and your work shapes how OneTrust builds software for years to come. You lead through influence and enablement, and you help the architects around you grow. Your customers are OneTrust's engineering teams, and you succeed when they do.Your Experience Includes
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 16+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Demonstrated impact on organization-wide technical strategy across multiple products or domains
- Deep expertise in distributed, cloud-native architecture, including microservices, microfrontends, event-driven integration, and API design
- Track record defining non-functional requirements and architecture governance at platform scale
- Experience designing for security, privacy, and compliance requirements in enterprise SaaS
- Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar), and a track record of helping teams adopt AI-native engineering practices
- Experience with compliance frameworks such as GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO/IEC 27001 or 27701
- Experience applying Team Topologies or similar operating models to architecture functions
For California, Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington-based candidates: the annual base pay range for this role is listed below. Within this range, individual pay is determined by several factors, including location, job-related skills, work experience, and relevant education and/or training. This role may also be eligible for discretionary bonuses, equity, and/or commissions, as well as benefits.
Salary Range
$196,500—$294,750 USD