Principal Architect

Overview

Who we are

Collaborative. Respectful. A place to dream and do. These are just a few words that describe what life is like at Toyota. As one of the world’s most admired brands, Toyota is growing and leading the future of mobility through innovative, high-quality solutions designed to enhance lives and delight those we serve. We’re looking for talented team members who want to Dream. Do. Grow. with us.

An important part of the Toyota family is Toyota Financial Services (TFS), the finance and insurance brand for Toyota and Lexus in North America. While TFS is a separate business entity, it is an essential part of this world-changing company- delivering on Toyota's vision to move people beyond what's possible. At TFS, you will help create best-in-class customer experience in an innovative, collaborative environment.

Toyota does not offer support or sponsorship of job applicants for employment-based visas or any other work authorization for this role now or in the future. You must have the right to work in the United States and not require Toyota support or sponsorship for immigration-related employment (e.g., H-1B, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, TN, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM, OPT, F-1 CPT, ‘job flexibility benefits’ [also known as I-140 or Adjustment of Status portability], etc.) now or in the future. You should not apply for this role if you will require Toyota to assist with immigration support or sponsorship now or in the future.

Who we're looking for

At TFS, we're building a greenfield, cloud-native engineering platform that will redefine how Toyota Financial Services delivers digital products to millions of customers. We're looking for a Principal Architect — a senior individual contributor at the top of our IC track — who owns the technical coherence of the entire platform. This is not a management role and it's not an advisory role. It's for the engineer who can see across every layer of the system — application, data, AI/ML, and infrastructure — make binding architectural decisions and then get in the code to validate them. You'll be the connective tissue between engineering teams, setting direction across the stack, shaping standards that last, and serving as the person engineering leadership trusts to say, "this is how we build it."

What you'll be doing

Platform Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Own the end-to-end reference architecture for our engineering platform team — application, data, AI/ML, and infrastructure layers — ensuring coherence across all product domains

• Make binding, well-documented architectural decisions across teams; author RFCs, ADRs, and design documents that become the foundation for how we build

• Lead platform-wide technical design reviews and architecture forums, driving alignment across engineering leads, engineering managers, and product

• Define, evolve, and enforce engineering standards: API design contracts, IaC patterns, security posture, observability baselines, and deployment safety

• Identify and resolve systemic risks before they become incidents — performance ceilings, reliability gaps, coupling issues, and architectural drift

• Evaluate and recommend new technologies, frameworks, and AWS services; balance innovation with operational maturity and team capability

Hands-On Implementation & Code Quality

• Contribute with spikes/production-quality code in TypeScript and/or Python — you validate architectural decisions by writing and reviewing the code, not just describing it

• Own the design and lead implementation of the most complex, cross-cutting platform components: shared infrastructure modules, API frameworks, data pipeline foundations, and AI/ML integration layers

• Lead technical troubleshooting for the hardest distributed system failures — from API latency and data pipeline failures to infrastructure misconfigurations and LLM reliability issues

• Review and approve architectural changes across codebases, holding a consistently high bar for quality, testability, observability, and security

Data Platform & AI/ML Architecture

• Architect the data backbone of the platform: S3-based lakehouse design, event-driven streaming pipelines, data orchestration, and analytical query patterns

• Define integration patterns for AI/ML capabilities — how Bedrock agents, SageMaker endpoints, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows connect to the application and data layers as first-class architectural concerns, not bolt-ons

• Establish guardrails for LLM-based systems: structured outputs, prompt engineering standards, observability for model behavior, and patterns for deterministic, production-grade AI features

• Partner with the ML/AI engineering team to ensure AI components are observable, testable, and maintainable at production scale

Cross-Functional Influence & Engineering Culture

• Serve as a technical thought partner to Engineering Managers and the VP of Engineering — translating complex technical tradeoffs into clear, actionable recommendations for both engineering and non-technical stakeholders

• Partner with Product and Program Management to assess technical feasibility, shape roadmaps, and surface risks early

• Drive the RFC and design review process across the engineering organization, ensuring major decisions have appropriate rigor and broad visibility

• Mentor senior and lead engineers — through design reviews, pairing, and written feedback — raising the technical ceiling of the entire org

• Contribute to hiring by conducting technical interviews for senior IC and architect-level roles, and helping define what architectural excellence looks like at TFS

• Champion a culture of documentation: ADRs, runbooks, design documents, and onboarding guides that transfer knowledge and reduce key-person risk

What you bring

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years of operating as a hands-on architect or principal-level IC on AWS-based platforms

• Proven track record of  owning full-platform architecture decisions  in production — not just advising, but being accountable for the outcomes

AWS & Cloud Architecture

• Deep, hands-on expertise with  serverless-first AWS architecture , including:

• Lambda ,  API Gateway  (REST and HTTP),  Step Functions ,  EventBridge ,  SQS/SNS  for compute and async orchestration

• DynamoDB  and/or  Aurora Serverless  for data persistence patterns

• S3 ,  CloudFront , and edge patterns for object storage, CDN strategy, and API acceleration

• Experience designing  multi-account AWS architectures  with proper governance: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, Service Control Policies, and cross-account IAM patterns

• Strong command of  IaC design and governance  using AWS CDK, CloudFormation, or Terraform — owning infrastructure design end-to-end, not just reviewing it

Data Platform

• Experience architecting  S3-based lakehouse patterns : table formats (Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake), partitioning strategies, and lifecycle management

• Hands-on design of  event-driven streaming pipelines  using Kinesis, MSK/Kafka, or similar, through to analytics with Athena, Redshift, or equivalent

• Familiarity with  data governance  patterns: Lake Formation, data cataloging, access control for sensitive financial data

AI/ML Integration

• Practical experience integrating  Amazon Bedrock , SageMaker endpoints, or equivalent LLM/ML services into production application architectures

• Understanding of  agentic flow design  — tool calling, memory patterns, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and failure recovery in multi-step agent workflows

• Experience with  RAG pipeline architecture  — embedding generation, vector store design (OpenSearch, pgvector, or similar), and query-time retrieval patterns

• Ability to define architectural standards for LLM reliability: structured outputs, guardrails, observability for model behavior, a