Principal Enterprise Architect, Infrastructure & Operations

This role is eligible for our hybrid work model: 2 days in-office

Principal Enterprise Architect, Infrastructure and Operations

Our Technology team is the backbone of our company: constantly creating, testing, learning and iterating to better meet the needs of our customers. If you thrive in a fast-paced, ideas-led environment, you’re in the right place. 

Why this job’s a big deal:

As a Principal Enterprise Architect for Infrastructure and Operations, you’ll set the strategy and standards that power reliability, speed, and safety across Priceline’s platforms, networks, and run-time environments.

This role raises the architectural bar for Priceline’s Infrastructure and Operations—building reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective foundations so product teams can ship quickly without chaos. You’ll unify platform engineering, SRE, networking, and multi-region cloud infrastructure into paved roads and guardrails that accelerate delivery, improve reliability, strengthen observability, reduce change-failure rate and MTTR, enable safe, scalable AI adoption, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

In this role you will get to:

• Define and evolve the target-state Infrastructure and Operations architecture aligned to Priceline’s long-term business and technology objectives, with a pragmatic phased roadmap and measurable interim milestones.

• Design and govern global, cloud-native platforms (e.g., Kubernetes/GKE, service mesh, data and messaging backbones, edge/CDN, identity/IAM, network architecture) that are resilient, scalable, secure, and cost-optimized—grounded in explicit trade-offs.

• Lead platform engineering strategy—establish paved roads/golden paths, an internal developer platform (IDP), reusable reference architectures, and self-service automation that shorten idea-to-production cycles.

• Lead architecture governance, codifying standards and guardrails, managing technical debt, ensuring compliance, and minimizing architectural risk.

• Partner with Product and Technology leaders to design end-to-end solutions across internal and third-party systems—defining integration patterns, API/data contracts, clear ownership boundaries, and SLAs.

• Institutionalize SRE fundamentals and advance Infrastructure as Code and GitOps.

• Embed security and privacy by design—partner with Security/Risk to implement Zero Trust, secrets and key management, vulnerability & patch orchestration, data protection, and regulatory controls (e.g., PCI, SOX, GDPR/CCPA) across platforms and pipelines.

• Use business criticality classification to drive resiliency, capacity, and performance engineering requirements, with automated IaC policies for topology/redundancy, data protection, observability configuration, SLOs, change management requirements, and IAM policies.

• Evaluate emerging technologies, patterns, and vendors to shape strategic roadmaps—leading build/buy/partner analyses, proofs of concept, and TCO/ROI assessments to de-risk decisions.

• Coach principal and staff engineers, uplevel engineering practices, and cultivate a culture of clarity, simplicity, and continuous improvement.

Who you are:

• Strategic thinker and clear communicator who can influence executives, peers, and engineers.

• Deep experience (8+ years) across cloud infrastructure and operations—Kubernetes/container platforms, platform engineering/IDP, networking and site traffic management/edge platforms, storage, observability, incident management, DR/BCP, and modern change management.

• Hands-on engineering background with fluency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), automation (e.g., Python/Go), GitOps/CI/CD, service mesh, and production observability.

• Cloud-native experience—ideally GCP (e.g. GKE, Cloud Service Mesh, VPC, CloudSQL/AlloyDB/Spanner, BigQuery, Bigtable, GCE, GCS, Vertex AI, Looker) and Kafka.

• Security-first mindset with practical knowledge of Zero Trust, IAM, secrets management, vulnerability management, security and identity protocols (PKI, TLS/mTLS, OAuth 2.0/OIDC), and privacy/compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI, SOX, GDPR/CCPA).

• FinOps-aware—able to model and optimize cost/reliability/latency trade-offs at scale.

• Bias for clarity and simplicity—reducing complexity and enabling teams to move faster and smarter.

• Analytical problem-framer who reduces ambiguity into clear, actionable components.

• Illustrated history of living the values necessary to Priceline: Customer, Innovation, Team, Accountability and Trust.

• The Right Results, the Right Way is not just a motto at Priceline; it’s a way of life. Unquestionable integrity and ethics are essential.

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. In addition to a competitive base salary, certain roles may be eligible for an annual bonus and/or equity grant.

The salary range for this position is $175,000- $220,000 USD.

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