Principal Architect- Hypervisors, Operating Systems, & Datacenter

If you are excited about shaping the future of technology and driving significant business impact in financial services, we are looking for people just like you. Join our team and help us develop game-changing, high-quality solutions. 

As a Principal Architect at JPMorganChase within our Core Infrastructure Platforms Architecture team, you will work across the hypervisor, operating system, and physical datacenter layers that underpin the firm's private cloud platform. This senior individual contributor role provides architectural leadership across the entire stack, identifying gaps between domains and driving solutions where ownership, alignment, or direction is unclear. You will add senior architectural capacity to the firm's private cloud platform programs, providing the end-to-end perspective needed to guide decisions across the full infrastructure stack.

Job responsibilities

• Maintains a practical, end-to-end understanding of the hypervisor, operating system and datacenter stack, including how the layers interact, where responsibilities sit, and how decisions in one area affect another.
• Identifies and unblocks work that has stalled between teams by defining missing requirements, prototyping uncertain solutions, driving decisions through the appropriate forums, documenting outcomes, and transitioning ownership to the relevant team.
• Partners with architects, design authorities and engineering teams across hypervisor platforms, operating systems, storage, networking, cyber and datacenter services, providing architectural leadership and technical depth while respecting domain ownership.
• Reviews and strengthens designs already in progress, ensuring they align across adjacent domains and contribute to a coherent, scalable platform.
• Influences technical direction across organizational boundaries through expertise, evidence and sound judgement rather than formal authority.
• Uses prototypes and reference implementations to validate ideas, reduce uncertainty and inform architectural decisions where analysis alone is insufficient.
• Establishes and publishes consumer requirements before evaluating technology options, ensuring solutions are driven by business needs rather than vendor offerings.
• Authors and reviews architecture decisions, design standards and reference architectures, including maintaining alignment between documented standards and implemented solutions.
• Leads cross-platform architectural work across the hypervisor estate, including capacity and placement models, lifecycle management, migration strategies, key management, attestation, and the interfaces that allow multiple hypervisors to operate as a unified platform.
• Provides cross-domain leadership across the operating system layer, covering image build and release pipelines, host and guest operating systems at scale, operating systems on accelerator hardware, and the patching, upgrade and certification processes that span them.
• Mentors engineers and architects, contributes to technical training and curriculum development, and produces documentation that enables teams to operate independently and effectively.                                                                                                 

Required qualifications, capabilities and skills

• Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts and 10+ years applied experience
• Extensive experience in Infrastructure Architecture, with significant practical experience applying architectural principles in complex environments.
• Deep expertise in enterprise hypervisor platforms operating at scale across multiple technologies, including scheduling, memory management, live migration, storage and network data paths, and failure modes.
• Deep operating system expertise across Linux and Windows estates, including image build and release pipelines, hardening, compliance scanning, patching, vulnerability remediation and lifecycle management.
• Hands-on experience with bare-metal infrastructure, including host provisioning, out-of-band management, firmware and BIOS lifecycle, Secure Boot, and hardware-backed attestation.
• Good understanding of datacenter infrastructure, including power, cooling, rack design, network topology, hardware lifecycle and the impact of physical design on fault domains and availability zones.
• Strong engineering background with the ability to write and troubleshoot production-quality code, in Go or Python. Comfortable working across operating systems, logs, networking and low-level diagnostics.
• Solid understanding of storage and networking technologies, including block and file storage, software-defined storage, network virtualization and hardware offload.
• Proven ability to contribute effectively in unfamiliar domains, quickly add value to complex problems, and help teams succeed without taking ownership away from them.
• Experience defining and publishing requirements before selecting technologies, with the judgement to challenge solutions that do not meet those requirements.
• Track record of producing architecture decision records, design standards and reference architectures that have been adopted in practice                                                       

 Preferred qualifications, capabilities and skills 

• Experience leading or supporting large-scale hypervisor migrations or platform consolidations where multiple platforms operate in production simultaneously.
• Experience working in multi-hypervisor environments and designing the abstraction, operational and capacity models needed to support them.
• Familiarity with accelerator and SmartNIC technologies, confidential computing and remote attestation.
• Experience with key management, hardware security modules, and certificate and secrets management for infrastructure platforms.
• Experience supporting virtual desktop platforms or other large-scale managed infrastructure services.
• Experience with bare-metal recovery, operationally isolated environments, and recovery architectures with defined recovery objectives.
• Contributions to open-source projects in virtualization, operating systems or infrastructure provisioning are advantageous.