Principal Integration Architect

About You You are a Principal Architect with deep expertise in Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, and API governance. We are looking for someone who has built enterprise-scale integration platforms and knows how to standardize how business domains communicate across systems and verticals. You will own decisions end-to-end, communicate blockers proactively, and influence engineering culture across multiple teams. You are as comfortable whiteboarding domain models with business stakeholders as you are reviewing pull requests with engineers. You are energized by AI adoption as a daily practitioner, you use tools like Copilot, RAG, or agentic workflows to build faster and better. This is a hands-on architecture role, not a delivery, program, or project management position. Note: This position is offered under a contractor model. You Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience. 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering. 5+ years of experience in Architecture, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Technical Leadership roles (with active, current hands-on coding). Proven experience designing and implementing enterprise-scale integration platforms and distributed systems, your core value is building a unified enterprise integration layer that standardizes how business domains communicate across systems and verticals. Strong expertise in: Modern .NET patterns, async pipelines, and enterprise-scale codebases. API Architecture and Enterprise Integrations including API governance at scale. Domain-Driven Design (DDD). Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Test-Driven Development (TDD). Microservices and Distributed Systems. Cloud-Native Architecture. Hands-on experience with enterprise messaging/event platforms — Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, RabbitMQ, Solace, Apache Kafka, or AWS SQS. Azure is highly desired b