Principle Architect

Principal Architect

Location: Cape Town, South Africa Contract: Permanent, Full-Time (Hybrid)

Leadership opportunity for a seasoned Principal Architect to join a globally recognized design and technology firm as they expand their footprint into Cape Town.

Our client is seeking a product-minded technologist to drive architectural outcomes across eCommerce, manufacturing, and data platforms. You will be the strategic lead for large-scale platform migrations and consolidations, balancing technical pragmatism with long-term clarity. This role is about high-level influence – mentoring staff engineers and setting the architectural guardrails that enable engineering teams to ship safely at pace.

• Architecture & Governance: Define target architectures, standards, and patterns while ensuring security, privacy, and compliance guardrails are upheld

• Delivery Enablement: Design robust interfaces and migration patterns that unblock teams and facilitate parallel delivery across the organization

• Developer Experience (DX) & Reliability: Partner with Platform teams to uplift CI/CD, observability, and SLOs, advocating for “paved roads” that improve flow and stability metrics

• Technical Leadership: Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers, run architectural forums, and translate complex technical decisions into business impact for executive stakeholders

What We Are Looking For

• Migration Expertise: Proven experience leading multi-quarter, large-scale platform or product migrations across multiple teams

• ECommerce Knowledge: Deep experience with high-volume transactional systems, including payments, checkouts, and order management.

• Technical Mastery: Expert knowledge of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), microservices, and event-driven architecture.

• Cloud & Full-Stack Breadth: Proficiency in AWS cloud-native environments, frontend architecture (Next.js, SSR, CDN/Edge), and backend services (Node/Java).

• Communication: A seasoned communicator who can turn ambiguity into clear direction and influence without formal authority

Salt is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.