Application Development Architect

OVERVIEW

• OnTrac is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Application Development Architect to join our client's Application Development department, part of a leading Google Cloud partner. This is a department role rather than a position on a single customer project: the architect carries billable engagements and pre-sales work concurrently and is expected to act in the best interest of stakeholders and customers across all of them.
• This role is ideal for a hands-on architect who owns application architecture on billable customer engagements, supports the Enterprise Cloud Architects (ECAs) in pre-sales by scoping solutions, producing level-of-effort estimates, and defending technical approaches in front of customers, and who leads engineering teams rather than waiting for problems to be escalated.
• You will work closely with the ECAs, Application Development leadership, delivery project managers, and customer stakeholders to ensure project success from initial definition through final delivery.

REQUIRED CREDENTIALS

• Professional software engineering and architecture experience with a demonstrated record of operating at a staff or principal level: owning solution architecture for customer engagements and guiding delivery teams
• Production delivery experience on Google Cloud Platform
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Application architecture for cloud-native systems: microservices, API design, event-driven patterns, and data modeling
• Java and Spring Boot depth, with working knowledge of at least one other backend stack such as Node.js/TypeScript or Python
• GCP application services, including Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL or AlloyDB, and IAM
• Design of agentic AI systems on Google Cloud (Gemini models, Google ADK, Vertex AI)
• Pre-sales skills: discovery facilitation, solution scoping, level-of-effort estimation, and technical input to SOWs and proposals
• Authoring technical design documents and architecture diagrams
• Presenting and negotiating technical trade-offs with customer stakeholders
• Leadership of engineering teams: setting technical direction, resolving problems on their own initiative, and developing the engineers around them
• Daily use of AI coding assistants and agentic development tools, and the ability to define how a delivery team uses them
• Security and compliance awareness for enterprise and public-sector environments

USEFUL QUALIFICATIONS

• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect and other Google Cloud Professional certifications
• Workflow or business rules engines (Camunda, Flowable)
• Frontend architecture with React
• Experience building reusable platform components or accelerators across engagements
• Experience in government or regulated environments
• Prior professional services experience at a cloud partner

SCOPE OF WORK

• The architect will work across multiple customer engagements and pre-sales opportunities at a time; the scope on any one engagement is set by its SOW and is subject to change.
• Own application architecture on assigned billable engagements, including technical design documents, architecture diagrams, and key implementation decisions, and remain hands-on in the codebase where needed
• Support the ECAs in pre-sales: join discovery sessions, define application development scope, produce level-of-effort estimates and staffing recommendations, and author the application development sections of SOWs and proposals
• Translate SOW scope into an implementation plan and backlog the engineering team can execute, and keep delivery aligned to that scope
• Identify problems in architecture, delivery, or team practice across the engagements you touch and resolve them or drive them to resolution without waiting for escalation
• Act in the best interest of stakeholders and customers when scope, quality, and timeline compete, and bring those conflicts to Application Development leadership and the ECAs early
• Lead the engineering teams on your engagements: set technical direction, review designs and code from L3 and L4 engineers, and develop the engineers around you
• Set and help improve the department's engineering standards, including agent-driven delivery procedures, and carry them across engagements
• Maintain the billable utilization target set by Application Development leadership while carrying pre-sales responsibilities

DETAILS

• Employment type: Full-time
• Location: Remote, United States