Principal Architect at ACI Worldwide in Norcross, GA

Job description

Powering the world’s payments ecosystem ACI powers the payments ecosystem – globally, and you power ACI. You’ll innovate, collaborate, and grow – in an energetic technology culture with decades of proven success. ACIers – in all roles and levels – are truly your colleagues and many are your friends. Our size and reach allow you to see the global impact of your work. You are visible, your talents are valued, and you are empowered to shape the future of payments. About the role As a Principal Architect at ACI, you'll shape how multiple products and platforms are built — taking on the toughest technical assignments where there's no obvious solution and setting architectural direction that spans well beyond a single team. You'll mentor architects and senior engineers across the organization and help align the broader architecture community around ACI's unified enterprise direction as cloud-native and AI-enabled practices become the default. What You'll Own Provide architecture leadership across multiple products or platforms — not just a single domain — resolving the toughest technical assignments where there's no obvious solution Perform significant mentoring and coaching of architects and senior engineers across the organization, communicating with broader architecture and engineering audiences to raise the collective bar Provide architectural and big-picture oversight for new or enhanced products and services, and create or shape Architecture Roadmaps that span product lines Drive compliance with and evolution of ACI's architectural standards across customer and product initiatives org-wide Support development and product leadership with high-level analysis, design reviews, performance/scalability guidance, and deep subject-matter expertise Plan and direct cross-product initiatives: review scope, plan resource use, and partner with project managers to ensure critical programs land Research and evaluate emerging technologies, design patterns, and products at a strategic level, determining what's worth incorporating across ACI's portfolio Maintain and actively leverage cross-product architectural knowledge, driving reuse of techniques and technologies across teams where it creates real value Set the standard for how AI/ML and cloud-native architecture are used across multiple product lines, not just within a single team Define how ACI’s platforms authenticate and authorize non-human payment initiators, positioning ACI’s architecture relative to emerging agent-initiated payment standards and agent identity/consent frameworks Define how AI coding and development agents are used safely across the SDLC — what can be delegated, what requires human review, and how architectural governance (ADRs, fitness functions) adapts as agents generate and modify production code Work directly with customers on innovative ideas and projects, translating customer needs into long-term technical strategy May select staff and provide input to performance reviews; contribute to resource planning and capital budget decisions for the architecture function Align the broader architecture community around critical directional issues, assisting Chief Architects in setting unified enterprise direction Our Tech Stack Deep expertise in this exact stack isn’t a hard requirement – strong architects from adjacent stacks are welcome to apply. Architecture modeling & governance — recognized expertise producing and reviewing ADRs, architecture models, and fitness-function frameworks across multiple teams Domain-driven design — deep, applied expertise using DDD to resolve real-time cross-system boundary problems at scale Cloud & data architecture — deep, cross-product expertise in multi-cloud design and data platform architecture (data lakes, warehouses, streaming) Gen AI / ML architecture — sets standards for AI/ML pipeline architecture across multiple product teams, including governance and observability practices Agentic commerce & agent payment protocols — working k