Principal Application Architect

About the role

As a Principal Application Architect, you will define long‑term architectural direction, guide engineering excellence through close partnership with the Nova team, and influence product and platform strategy across CIAS. This is a hands‑on architectural leadership role: deep in design, grounded in delivery, and accountable for non‑functional outcomes at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• Serve as an architectural authority for CIAS platforms supported by Nova, with accountability for stability, performance, security, and correctness
• Define and evolve the long‑term architectural vision, strategy, and modernization roadmaps across Nova‑owned systems
• Lead the design and evolution of large‑scale, distributed, cloud‑native platforms operating at Sabre scale
• Develop and maintain architectural blueprints, domain models, integration patterns, and target‑state architectures
• Guide engineering teams through complex design decisions and trade‑offs, balancing delivery realities with long‑term platform health
• Partner with CIAS Product leadership, Engineering leaders, and CIAS Solutions Architects to ensure architecture aligns with CIAS architectural North Star vision, business strategy and performance requirements
• Drive architectural governance, ensuring consistency, security, compliance, and audit readiness across CIAS services
• Influence senior technical and business stakeholders across CIAS and Sabre to drive architectural alignment and strategic outcomes
• Conduct deep‑dive design reviews and targeted code reviews for critical paths, high‑risk changes, and production readiness
• Mentor senior engineers within Nova, raising the technical bar and strengthening architectural capability across the team
• Champion engineering excellence, cloud‑first principles, and operational rigor
• Qualifications & Experience
• Required Experience
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, application architecture, or technical leadership roles
• Proven experience architecting and delivering large‑scale, distributed, cloud‑based systems
• Demonstrated ownership of non‑functional requirements (performance, availability, security, resilience) fo

Benefits

Additional Information

Powering the agentic revolution in travel. Sabre is an AI-native technology leader, backed by one of the world's largest travel data clouds. Built on an open, modular, cloud-native architecture, Sabre serves as the backbone for both established leaders and bold, new disruptors, guiding them to the next age of travel retailing through intelligent, connected, and personalized experiences. With AI at its core and operating at unparalleled scale, Sabre transforms insights into innovation, empowering airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel worldwide. Location: Kraków (hybrid work - 3 day per week in the office) Principal Application Architect - Nova Team Role Overview Sabre is seeking an experienced Principal Application Architect to support the Nova Team, a strategic engineering group within the Customer Identity and Access Solutions (CIAS) organization. Nova is responsible for driving platform modernization, cloud‑native transformation, and architectural excellence across CIAS's most critical identity and access platforms. This role reports to the Senior Director of Software Engineering and operates as a technical authority across Nova‑owned systems and the broader CIAS landscape. About the Nova Team The Nova team owns and supports a portfolio of foundational Sabre platform and infrastructure services, including: Off‑Host Session Manager (OHSM) Cross Domain Session Store (CDSS) and related services (Sync, Garbage Collector) Customer Viewership (CVSP) Security Shared Cache These platforms operate at Sabre scale, supporting thousands of transactions per second with low‑latency response characteristics (10-100 milliseconds). As a result, Nova's scope is focused on systems where stability, performance, security, and correctness are non‑negotiable, and where outages, regressions, or audit gaps have immediate enterprise‑level impact. Over the past several years, Nova has consistently converted high‑risk scope into stable, compliant, and cost‑controlled outcomes, including: Leading production readiness with zero disruption for initial client traffic on critical platforms Stabilizing Router and OHSM into trusted CIAS infrastructure Establishing repeatable performance and testing practices Delivering PCI 4.0 audit outcomes, including late‑scope SIM remediation Driving modernization through CI/CD improvements, repository migrations, and platform hardening (notably CVSP) Reducing infrastructure footprint across multiple systems, delivering ongoing run‑rate cost avoidance Collectively, these outcomes have avoided audit failures, protected platform‑level SLAs, prevented incident‑driven cost and escalation, and reduced long‑term operational spend-while keeping CIAS's most critical platforms performant and reliable at scale.

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