Principle Software Architect

Position Title: Principle Software Architect

The Area: The Morningstar Indexes Team leverages its expertise in equity research, manager research, asset allocation, and portfolio construction to create innovative investment solutions. It uses Morningstar’s intellectual property to create indexes that empower investors to achieve their goals at every stage of the investment process—market monitoring, benchmarking, and asset allocation. The fast-growing business offers a broad suite of global equity, bond, commodity and asset allocation indexes.

The Role: We are seeking an experienced Principal Software Architect to own and evolve the technical vision for a global, product-led organization running fully on AWS. This hands-on leader will define reference architectures and standards, validate and approve major designs, and drive cloud-native, secure, scalable, cost-efficient solutions across distributed product teams. The role requires close collaboration with product, engineering, SRE/DevOps and architecture peers in multiple locations to ensure alignment to non-functional requirements (performance, availability, resilience, security, observability) and to enable consistent, repeatable delivery using IaC and modern CI/CD practices. The ideal candidate brings strong technical judgment, excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, and a proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and resolving complex cross-team technical challenges.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own technical and reference architecture across product lines, ensuring alignment with business goals, scalability, security, reliability and cost-efficiency.
• Drive cloud-native architecture strategy and roadmaps (microservices, serverless, data, integration, CI/CD) with strong adherence to AWS best practices (Well-Architected).
• Produce and maintain architecture artifacts: solution blueprints, HLD/LLD, ADRs, runbooks and migration plans.
• Lead architecture reviews and design sessions across global teams; chair or participate in Architecture Review Board activities and coordinate cross-location decision-making.
• Specify and enforce non-functional requirements (performance, availability, resilience, security, maintainability, observability).
• Own cross-cutting concerns: IAM, networking, encryption/KMS, backup & DR, monitoring/telemetry, incident response and capacity planning.
• Promote and standardize Infrastructure-as-Code, cost optimization, secure multi-account patterns, and repeatable deployment patterns.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects, drive technical governance, and help resolve complex design and operational issues.

Requirements:

• Minimum 10 years of relevant software architecture/engineering experience, with a significant portion designing production systems on AWS.
• Deep knowledge of AWS services and cloud-native design patterns; experience applying the AWS Well-Architected framework.
• Proven experience with distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven design and scalable data architectures.
• Strong hands-on experience with IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines and automation, strong knowledge in Java.
• Solid understanding of security, compliance, networking and operational excellence for cloud systems.
• Track record of working in global/product organizations and collaborating across geographically distributed teams.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience preferred.

Good to Have:

• AWS Certification(s) (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer).
• JVM tuning and profiling experience (performance analysis, GC tuning, profilers).
• Knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes and other containerization/orchestration platforms.
• Familiarity with web UI frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, etc.).
• Python programming experience.
• Experience with Drools and jBPM.
• Exposure to Capital Markets domain (indexes, equities, trading workflows).
• Experience with observability tools (CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, ELK/EFK, Prometheus/Grafana).

EOE Statement:

Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.

Morningstar’s hybrid work environment gives you the opportunity to work remotely and collaborate in-person each week. We’ve found that we’re at our best when we’re purposely together on a regular basis, at least three days each week. A range of other benefits are also available to enhance flexibility as needs change. No matter where you are, you’ll have tools and resources to engage meaningfully with your global colleagues.