Principal Architect – Agentic Engineering

Position Summary

Vista Equity Partners is seeking a Director, Principal Architect – Agentic Engineering to help transform how our portfolio companies build enterprise software.

This role will lead the technical execution of Vista’s Agentic Engineering Factory framework, working hands-on with portfolio company engineering teams to apply AI and agentic technologies across the software development lifecycle. The Principal Architect will drive technical transformation at select portfolio companies while translating lessons learned into reusable architectures, agent libraries, evaluation frameworks, and standards that can scale across the broader Vista portfolio.

The role requires a rare combination of deep technical expertise, hands-on engineering capability, enterprise architecture experience, and the ability to partner credibly with CTOs, engineering leaders, and executive teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical execution of agentic engineering transformations at select Vista portfolio companies, from initial assessment and proof of concept through implementation, scale, and handoff.
• Assess engineering environments, including repository readiness, existing AI adoption, infrastructure gaps, and opportunities for high-impact use cases.
• Work hands-on with portfolio company engineers to build and implement agentic engineering capabilities, including knowledge layers, agents, orchestration, evaluations, guardrails, and observability.
• Diagnose and resolve technical challenges across repositories, workflows, agent configurations, and evaluation frameworks.
• Develop reusable reference architectures, agent libraries, technical standards, evaluation frameworks, and implementation patterns for use across the Vista portfolio.
• Establish appropriate controls for identity, permissions, evaluation, auditability, escalation, and human-in-the-loop decision making.
• Evaluate AI platforms, models, development tools, and orchestration technologies while maintaining appropriate vendor independence.
• Partner with portfolio company CTOs and engineering leaders to establish sustainable internal capabilities and operating models.
• Enable Vista teams and portfolio company engineers to successfully apply the Agentic Engineering Factory framework.
• Establish technical standards and acceptance criteria for external system integrators and delivery partners.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in production software engineering, including experience at the Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, or comparable level.
• Demonstrated architecture ownership across multiple engineering teams or business units, with experience establishing technical standards at enterprise scale.
• Proven track record leading multi-quarter technical implementations and delivering production systems within complex organizations.
• 2+ years of hands-on, production use of frontier AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience building production agentic systems, including orchestration, tool use, memory, evaluation frameworks, and human-in-the-loop design.
• Deep experience working with brownfield enterprise environments, including legacy codebases, monoliths, multi-repository environments, and complex compliance requirements.
• Strong cloud infrastructure expertise across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP, including CI/CD, containerization, observability, and security controls.
• Demonstrated ability to build reusable platforms, frameworks, standards, or internal products adopted beyond your immediate team.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both deeply technical audiences and senior executives.
• Experience with developer productivity measurement, system integrators, consulting, private equity operating environments, or large-scale organizational transformation is preferred.
• Willingness to travel up to 50%.

The annualized base pay range for this role is expected to be between $200,000 - $315,000. Actual base pay could vary based on factors including but not limited to experience, subject matter expertise, geographic location where work will be performed and the applicant’s skill set. The base pay is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other components may include an annual cash bonus and a comprehensive benefits package.