Principal Architect
About this role
Join Vonage and help us innovate cloud communications for businesses worldwide!
Why this role matters:
Vonage's API Business Unit is building a modern, lean architecture practice in a small central architecture team that empowers distributed teams to make fast, sound decisions independently. This is a high-impact individual contributor role at the heart of that practice.
You will work across product and platform boundaries, providing the architectural clarity, shared patterns, and strategic direction that connects engineering decisions to business outcomes.
You'll bring structure to complexity, help teams navigate trade-offs, and build the architectural capability that lets the organisation move faster with confidence.
Your key responsibilities:
Define and evolve architecture strategy, reference models, and target states across the CPaaS platform
Shape technology direction through standardisation, simplification, and platform investments
Co-ordinate cross-domain architectural initiatives (resilience, security, compliance, observability, developer experience)
Champion architecture practices and governance (ADRs, Well-Architected practices)
Partner with engineering and product leaders to translate business needs into scalable solutions
Provide hands-on support in solving complex architectural challenges
Communicate architectural vision and decisions to both technical and business stakeholders
Mentor engineers and architects while contributing to internal communities and best practices
Treats AI assisted engineering as a core part of modern software practice, leveraging AI tools to enhance design, coding, testing, troubleshooting, and documentation, while guiding the team in adopting effective patterns and evolving best practices for AI enabled ways of working
Requirements
- Demonstrable skills and experience in a senior architecture role with scope across multiple teams, products, or shared platforms
- Demonstrable experience of leveraging architectural practice to steer and deliver measurable business value and reduce unnecessary costs.
- Deep expertise in cloud-native and distributed systems architectures, ideally on AWS
- Strong experience with SaaS, API-based, and developer-facing platforms — CPaaS or communications domain experience is a plus
- Proficiency across modern technologies and practices: microservices, Kubernetes, event-driven architectures (Kafka), CI/CD, DevSecOps, and Infrastructure as Code
- Proven ability to apply structured architectural techniques — capability mapping, ADRs, C4 diagrams, in practical, proportionate ways
- Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to align stakeholders and drive decisions without formal authority
- Experience balancing architectural consistency with team autonomy in fast-moving, agile engineering organisations
- Experience we consider a plus:
- Knowledge of communications protocols (e.g. SMS/RCS, WebRTC, SIP)
- Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g. TOGAF, Zachman)
- AWS, Kubernetes, or related cloud certifications
- Knowledge and experience of working within an Agile methodology.
- How you’ll benefit:
- Medical Insurance
- Glasses Reimbursement
- Life Insurance – Allianz Family
- Kafeteria – My Benefit
- Ericsson Care Line
- Discretionary Time Off (DTO)
- Volunteer Time Off (VTO)
- Additional benefits and perks will be discussed during the interview process
About Vonage
Vonage is a global cloud communications leader. And your talent will further help brands - such as Airbnb, Viber, WhatsApp, and Snapchat - accelerate their digital transformation through our fully programmable-based unified communications, contact center solutions, and communications APIs. Ready to innovate? Then join us today. Note: The purpose of this profile is to provide a general summary of essential responsibilities for the position and is not meant as an exhaustive list. Assignments may differ for individuals within the same role based on business conditions, departmental need or geographic location.