Principal Solution Architect – CX & MarTech

Position: Principal Solution Architect – CX & MarTech
Location: Washington, DC – Hybrid -3 days onsite

Must have :  Principal Solution Architecture, Loyalty/Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Kafka/Event-Driven Architecture, Marketing Technology Integration, AWS, Data Pipelines (Airflow/NiFi), Enterprise Architecture (TOGAF), and strong stakeholder communication.

Job Description

A Principal Solution Architect who can rapidly assess a complex customer data and marketing ecosystem, identify bottlenecks, design scalable integration solutions, and communicate effectively with both business and technical stakeholders.
Client is seeking a Principal Solution Architect to join a high-profile Enterprise Architecture team for a major travel and transportation leader based in Washington, DC. In this critical, short-term tactical sprint, you will serve as the core architect translating complex marketing and loyalty business needs into high-performance backend solution designs. This role requires a T-shaped technical leader who can immediately diagnose system bottlenecks, optimize real-time data pipelines, and orchestrate integrations across a complex Customer Data Platform (CDP) and MarTech ecosystem. You will act as a key collaborator between engineering teams and non-technical business stakeholders, ensuring all solutions align with strict enterprise governance, scalability, and PII compliance standards.

Key Responsibilities

• System Diagnostics & Optimization: Review the current "as-is" customer experience and marketing data ecosystem to identify critical bottlenecks where systems are overloaded or lagging.
• Solution & Data Flow Design: Author high-level solution architecture diagrams, detailed data lineage maps (source $\rightarrow$ transformation $\rightarrow$ destination), and high-level API/interface definitions.
• Tradeoff Analysis: Evaluate 2–3 technical approaches for complex integration challenges and articulate the clear pros, cons, and business implications to leadership.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitate requirements discussions with marketing teams, product owners, and engineering squads, translating highly technical constraints into simple, business-friendly language.
• Governance Alignment: Align all designs with established enterprise standards (including TOGAF concepts) and enforce strict compliance regarding PII handling, consent, and data privacy (GDPR/CCPA).

Qualifications & Core Competencies

• Customer Domain Expertise: Deep, practical experience designing architectures for complex loyalty program structures (points, tiers, accrual/redemption), member profiles, and omni-channel marketing campaigns (segmentation, targeting, personalization).
• Advanced Integration & Messaging: Mastery of integration patterns, including real-time event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging (Kafka/MSK), and robust ETL/data pipelines (Airflow or NiFi preferred).
• CDP & Data Fundamentals: Strong conceptual and practical knowledge of Customer Data Platforms (CDP), identity resolution, and core data modeling tradeoffs (normalization vs. denormalization).
• Cloud Architecture: Foundational proficiency in the AWS ecosystem, specifically covering compute (EC2, containers, serverless), storage (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), and core networking/security (VPC, subnets).
• T-Shaped Technical Breadth: Broad, conceptual familiarity across the full stack—including how web/mobile front-ends consume APIs, microservices vs. monolith tradeoffs, CRM platforms (Salesforce), and modern MarTech engines (Adobe, Braze).
• Industry Experience (Plus): Prior architecture experience within the travel, hospitality, or aviation sectors—specifically regarding booking lifecycles (Search $\rightarrow$ Offer $\rightarrow$ Order $\rightarrow$ Fulfillment) or Passenger Service Systems (PSS)—is highly valued.