Principal Architect – Software Products

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Job Description:

The Principal Architect is a experienced technical leader responsible for shaping long-term software product architecture strategy, influencing system and platform roadmaps, and ensuring consistency, quality, and extensibility across multiple software product families. This role operates across organizational boundaries and drives architectural alignment from low-level embedded software through customer-facing software platforms and tools.

Key Responsibilities
Architecture & Technical Leadership
•    Define, own, and evolve the end-to-end software architecture for Microchip software products, spanning boot architecture, low-level drivers, middleware, RTOS integration, application frameworks, tools integration, and customer-facing APIs.
•    Establish and enforce architectural principles, design patterns, coding standards, and best practices that ensure scalability, portability, performance, security, and long-term maintainability across software products.
•    Act as the principal technical authority for software architecture decisions across multiple software product lines and development organizations.
•    Lead architectural trade studies and make high-impact technical decisions balancing customer needs, platform constraints, cost, risk, and time-to-market.
 

Software Platform & System Architecture
•    Architect reusable, configurable, and modular software platforms supporting Microchip software products across 8-bit and 32-bit MCU ecosystems (PIC®, AVR®, ARM®-based, RISC-V).
•    Drive system-level software architecture and HW/SW co-design, working closely with silicon, systems, tools, and applications teams to influence feature definition and roadmap planning.
•    Define platform abstraction layers and extensibility models that enable reuse across software products and future generations.
•    Lead the creation of reference software stacks, proof-of-concept systems, and architectural prototypes that accelerate internal development and customer adoption.

Cross-Functional & External Collaboration
•    Collaborate with silicon architecture, firmware, validation, tools, applications, and marketing teams to ensure software product architecture aligns with business strategy and customer value.
•    Provide architectural guidance, design reviews, and mentorship across geographically distributed engineering teams.
•    Serve as a senior technical interface for key customers and strategic partners, supporting complex integrations, platform adoption, and system-level challenges.

Documentation, Enablement & Strategy
•    Author and maintain high-level software architecture definitions, platform specifications, and technical guidelines used across software product programs.
•    Guide customer-facing enablement assets—reference designs, application notes, software frameworks, Applications Specific Standard Products - ASSPs and libraries—to ensure architectural consistency and quality.
•    Mentor senior and junior engineers, strengthening architectural discipline, systems thinking, and long-term design rigor across the organization.
•    Contribute to Microchip’s long-term software product and platform strategy, identifying opportunities for convergence, reuse, differentiation, and innovation.
 

Requirements/Qualifications:

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Telecommunications, or equivalent industry experience.

Technical Expertise

• Extensive experience architecting embedded and system-level software products for complex, multi-product environments.
• Expert proficiency in Embedded C, with deep understanding of real-time systems, concurrency, and low-level hardware interaction.
• Strong system-level knowledge of MCU- and SoC-based platforms, including peripherals, memory architectures, interrupts, boot flows, and power management.
• Proven experience defining and maintaining software frameworks, APIs, abstraction layers, and product platforms.
• Solid understanding of digital hardware fundamentals and the ability to influence HW/SW partitioning decisions.
• Familiarity with FPGA-based or programmable logic systems and their architectural implications (RTL/schematics knowledge a plus).

Leadership & communication
•    Demonstrated ability to lead through technical influence and credibility, not formal authority.
•    Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of articulating complex architectural concepts to engineers, management, and customers.
•    Strategic mindset with strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

Travel Time:

No Travel

To all recruitment agencies: Microchip Technology Inc. does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our recruiting team or other Microchip employees. Microchip is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.