Principal Architect

Company

Cox Automotive - USA

Job Family Group

Engineering / Product Development

Job Profile

Principal Architect

Management Level

Director

Flexible Work Option

Hybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

Travel %

Yes, 5% of the time

Work Shift

Day

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary of $159,400.00 - $265,600.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

Job Description

The Cox Automotive Data Solutions team delivers innovative, data-driven product capabilities that help the industry operate more efficiently, engage consumers more meaningfully and profitably, and make Cox Automotive solutions the best in the industry.

As a Principal Architect on the Consumer Intelligence Release Train, you will be at the heart of Cox Automotive’s rapidly growing data ecosystem. You will leverage your skills to drive innovation in the automotive ownership space, actively participating in the ideation, discovery, and design of data science and machine learning solutions. 

You will lead the architecture for the Cox Automotive Data Solutions Consumer Intelligence team, reporting to the Sr. Director of Architecture for Data Intelligence. In this role, you will collaborate with architects across Cox Automotive, as well as with engineering, product, and agile leaders, to establish a unified technological and architectural vision.  You will drive the definition of architectural styles and patterns necessary to meet both functional and non-functional requirements. You will validate solutions, identify risks and dependencies, and evaluate alternatives through hands-on research, discovery, and prototyping.  You will support solution development by providing, communicating, and evolving the overarching technological and architectural perspective.  You will frame solution alternatives in both technology and business terms, ensuring that product and business decisions consider their technical implications, and vice versa. And, you will define the technology landscape for Data Solutions in collaboration with peers in the architecture and engineering organization to help standardize and simplify our environments.

The ideal candidate will balance product solutioning with hands-on technical expertise and a strong engineering background, including experience in data modeling, data engineering, machine learning, and API design. You will lead a community of engineers, product owners, and other stakeholders towards a shared technical direction and strategy.  You will collaborate closely with other architects and product leaders across Cox Automotive's diverse product portfolio to meet specific business needs. Additionally, you will work directly with engineers, building prototypes and proofs of concept.  Your collaboration, mentorship, and technical guidance will empower teams to make local decisions and will foster a spirit of iteration, resulting in a faster flow of incremental value.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Define and evolve the architectural direction, long-term vision, and guiding principles for delivery of data products within the Data Solutions architecture team and with architects across Cox Automotive.
• Participate in planning, definition, and high-level design of the solution, explore alternative solutions, and develop necessary documentation.
• Perform in-depth research of problem domains, approaches, and solutions.
• Collaborate with counterparts to ensure solutions meet organizational needs and effectively present findings to help drive informed decisions and keep stakeholders informed.
• Drive creation, adoption, and reuse of enterprise technology assets while identifying opportunities to create new reusable technology assets and patterns; advocate for their use across the enterprise.
• Identify technical, security, performance, operational, and compliance risks, along with their probability and impact; propose mitigation strategies for minimizing or eliminating risks, and advocate for engineering cycles to address each.
• Track and analyze technical debt and advocate for appropriate debt management.
• Collaborate with delivery teams to refine solution designs and technical approaches to define an achievable implementation, while providing guidance on requirements and strategy.
• Develop an architectural runway in support of upcoming requirements and work with counterparts to ensure that necessary work is prioritized and delivered.
• Act as a mentor and coach for engineering leaders and team members to promote an culture of learning and growth.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with diverse teams, fostering a positive and inclusive work environment through empathy, active listening, and conflict resolution skills.
• Highly analytical and capable of diving technically deep to rapidly deliver proof-of-concepts and perform experimentation.
• Breadth of knowledge across architecture domains with depth in application, data, and technical architecture.
• Extensive technical experience and knowledge of big data engineering and API delivery at scale.
• Understanding of data science and machine learning processes for product delivery.
• Intimate understanding of big data processing, data integrations, streaming and batch processing, data and analytic product development, data security, and data governance.
• Experience developing software in Python and other programming languages (Java, Scala, C#, etc).
• Experience developing APIs at scale using GraphQL and/or REST
• Experience in full development life cycle and significant experience in delivering applications and architecture services in a production environment.
• 3+ years architecting for and delivering solutions in a public cloud environment (AWS preferred).
• Strong familiarity in working within DevOps and/or DataOps cultures, with a focus on process inefficiency identification, decomposition, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Strong proficiency with relational and non-relational database technologies (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, graph datastores, etc.), especially for information processing and exchange, analytics, and real-time inference workloads.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 10 years’ experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master’s degree and 8 years’ experience; a Ph.D. and 5 years’ experience in a related field; or 22 years’ experience in a related field.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience building applications to realize 3 or more of these capabilities: data ingestion/exchange, data integration, data transformation, application integration, data security, information asset discovery and cataloging, knowledge management.
• Hands-on experience identifying and tuning the appropriate data systems for various workloads (integrations/exchange, processing, mining, analytics, reporting, ETL, etc.).
• Deep understanding of the architecture of consumer-scale data processing systems, distributed systems integration, and cloud computing platforms
• Experience in a Lean Agile development environment with weekly and/or daily releases.
• 2+ years’ leadership experience.

Drug Testing

To be employed in this role, you’ll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.

Benefits

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.

About Us

Through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers alike, Cox Automotive employees are transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars. Cox Automotive employees get to work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim, all while enjoying the people-centered atmosphere that is central to our life at Cox. Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO). For more details on what benefits you may be offered, visit our benefits page. Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.