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LI-COR Biosciences seeks a Principal System Architect to provide technical direction and hands-on engineering for connected environmental products and cloud platforms. This is a senior individual contributor role spanning instruments, firmware, connectivity, cloud services, data, and applications. You will work across engineering, product, science, quality, IT, DevOps, and external technology partners to build systems that are reliable, secure, scalable, supportable, and economically sustainable.
Key responsibilities include:
**Architecture and Platform Direction:** Define and maintain target architecture, system boundaries, data models, integration patterns, and technical roadmap for connected products and cloud platforms. Lead architecture reviews for services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, identity, applications, and device-to-cloud communication. Simplify the platform by identifying unnecessary coupling, duplicate processing, and fragile patterns. Guide platform modernization and managed cloud service adoption. Maintain architecture decisions and documentation to preserve technical control and knowledge.
**Device to Cloud Architecture:** Guide how devices produce data and how cloud services receive, process, store, and present it. Partner with Firmware and Hardware Engineering to identify connectivity, scalability, reliability, and cost implications early. Review new products and sensor integrations for downstream effects on cloud services, storage, analytics, and cost-to-serve.
**Reliability, Security, and Operations:** Define end-to-end observability and nonfunctional requirements for availability, performance, security, privacy, scalability, recovery, and supportability. Partner on CI/CD, infrastructure as code, release architecture, incident response, and disaster recovery. Provide technical leadership during significant incidents. Ensure platform designs support validation, data separation, retention, privacy, auditability, and contractual requirements.
**Technical Leadership:** Serve as technical partner to Software and Cloud leadership and architecture authority across teams. Remain hands-on through backend design, implementation, prototypes, code reviews, and production issue resolution. Translate product intent into technically complete approaches. Mentor engineers and strengthen architecture capability. Act as LI-COR's technical counterpart with cloud, data, connectivity, and engineering partners.
Periodic travel to LI-COR locations, partner sites, or team working sessions may be required.
**Requirements:**
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related discipline (Master's preferred)
- Typically 12+ years of software and cloud engineering experience, including significant experience as system, solution, platform, or principal architect for production systems
- Demonstrated architecture ownership for commercial IoT, connected device, industrial, scientific, telemetry, or high-volume data platform
- Deep experience with AWS or comparable public cloud (compute, containers, networking, databases, storage, identity/access, observability, security, resiliency, infrastructure as code)
- Strong backend engineering and API design skills with hands-on proficiency in at least one modern backend language
- Experience with event-driven and distributed systems, device ingestion, message delivery, high-volume time series data, data modeling, and data lifecycle management
- Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and secure software delivery at production scale
- Ability to connect architecture decisions to delivery effort, operational cost, product economics, and customer impact
- Strong communication, technical judgment, systems thinking, and ability to lead through influence across teams and external partners
**Preferred Experience:**
- Architecture spanning embedded devices/firmware, cellular/gateway connectivity, cloud ingestion, web/mobile applications, and analytics
- Regulated, validated, or quality-controlled systems with requirements for data access, retention, privacy, auditability, and change control
- Platform modernization, microservice simplification, globally distributed teams, or blended employee/contractor delivery models
- Professional-level cloud certification or equivalent practical expertise
