Role: Principal Application ArchitectLocation: Riverwoods, ILTerm: ContractResponsible for leading the charge to drive technology strategy and technical capabilities for an application ecosystem. Leverage deep understanding of business processes and technical building blocks to design application architecture that balances business and customer needs with technical non-functional requirements for resiliency, security and efficiency. Partners with application engineers to ensure the application ecosystem is engineered according to architecture vision and continuously evolve the architecture and application to meet changing customer and business needs. Actively manages and escalates risk and customer-impacting issues within the day-to-day role to management.Responsibilities:Partners with Sr. Product Owner(s) to develop product vision and strategy and align product vision with technology strategyIndependently oversees the design process for an applicationCoaches' other architects to develop product quality strategy including nonfunctional requirements, such as reliability, availability, and security.Demonstrates a deep understanding of business processes and technical building blocksTrains others in solution design patternsCoaches' internal technology communities and are actively engaged in understanding and researching modern technologies and patternsCreate and maintain big-picture design view of product portfolioDesign and document solutions that meet the business needs.Conduct feasibility analysis, product comparison, capability mapping, high level estimationsApply Architecture development processes as required by the organizationCreate requirements and architectural specifications, functionality, and integration with new/existing systems.Minimum QualificationsBachelors – Computer Science or related10+ Years – Software Development, Software Engineering, Technical Architecture or relatedPreferred QualificationsExperience in architecture and design for card transaction processing applications.In depth knowledge on ISO8583 message formats.Experience with Payment networks, Banking industry and Debit card processing.Experience building high performing, scalable systems that adapt and grow to customer needs.Understanding of technology evaluation process.Experience with modern development practices such as CI/CD, SOA and microservices.Familiarity and experience using Kubernetes, AWS and/or other cloud computing services.Knowledge of API, Application integration patternsGood communication, and presentation skills