Principal Systems Architect
Palitronica
IT
Waterloo, ON, Canada · Canada · Ontario, Canada · Waterloo, ON, Canada
Posted on Sep 6, 2025
The impact you’ll have
We’re hiring a Principal Systems Architect to own our end‑to‑end system architecture and the deployment architecture that brings it to life—on‑prem (including air‑gapped) and in cloud/VPC environments. Your work will turn complex, cross‑disciplinary designs into reliable, observable, and secure deployments that scale.
What You’ll Do
We’re hiring a Principal Systems Architect to own our end‑to‑end system architecture and the deployment architecture that brings it to life—on‑prem (including air‑gapped) and in cloud/VPC environments. Your work will turn complex, cross‑disciplinary designs into reliable, observable, and secure deployments that scale.
What You’ll Do
- Own the system architecture across device → edge → cloud → ML; keep interfaces stable, versioned, and well‑documented.
- Define contracts & schemas (device identity/PKI, telemetry, commands, error taxonomy, model I/O) and capture decisions in ADRs.
- Design deployment reference architectures for air‑gapped/on‑prem, customer VPC, and Palitronica‑hosted environments.
- Establish upgrade/rollback strategies (signed artifacts, staged rollout, schema/data migrations, recovery playbooks) and practice them.
- Build observability‑by‑design (logs/metrics/traces), define SLOs/error budgets, and loop incident learnings back into the architecture.
- Lead packaging & bootstrap: golden images/manifests (e.g., containers/Helm/Compose), installers, day‑2 ops (backup/restore, DR).
- Produce reference implementations/POCs to de‑risk critical paths and guide teams (small services, installers, firmware stubs).
- Partner with System Integration to convert field captures into repeatable playbooks and minimal tooling others can run.
- Run pragmatic design reviews, mentor senior ICs, and raise the quality bar without slowing delivery.
- 10+ years building embedded/edge + distributed systems; 5+ years in an architecture role (systems/edge‑cloud/platform).
- Real-world experience with cloud solution architecture including PaaS, SaaS, IaC.
- Hands‑on depth in at least two: RTOS/firmware & gateways, microservices, data/ML pipelines.
- Proven delivery of device identity/PKI, secure boot/update, and observability in production.
- Real‑world on‑prem experience (air‑gaps, proxies, limited egress) and rollback‑first thinking.
- Packaging/build expertise: containers, Helm/Compose; Debian/RPM/Yocto/image pipelines.
- Ability to write clear ADRs and small reference code to lead by example (language flexible).
- Strong communication and cross‑functional leadership across HW, Firmware, SW, ML, and DevOps.
- Industrial/IIoT background; Kubernetes; feature stores/model serving; cost/perf tuning.
