The Chief Architect is responsible for defining the technical architecture of the company’s product landscape and future.
This role will shape how the company moves from a portfolio of products and legacy architecture into a more coherent, unified, AI-enabled platform. You will define target-state architecture, identify the highest-value technical interventions, guide major technical decisions, and help engineering leadership make better long-term tradeoffs.
This is not an ivory tower architecture role. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can combine first-principles technical thinking with practical execution. You must be able to see the future clearly enough to drive toward it and stay grounded enough to help teams ship.
Success means sharper technical direction, fewer fragmented decisions, better platform coherence, stronger architectural integrity, and a credible path from today’s complexity to tomorrow’s platform.
About the TeamYou will report to the CTO and work closely with Product Engineering, Product Flow, VP of AI, platform leaders, and senior engineers. You may lead a Vanguard Engineering capability focused on prototyping and validating future-state architecture and leading the charge delivering the hardest to architect and build product areas.
What You’ll Do:
- Define the target-state architecture for the company’s platform evolution
- Drive architectural direction across APIs, services, integration patterns, data, identity, and AI-enabled capabilities
- Help the company move from fragmented systems toward a more coherent platform model
- Guide major architectural decisions with clear reasoning, tradeoff analysis, and pragmatic recommendations
- Identify architectural bottlenecks, duplication, scaling risks, and structural weaknesses
- Focus leadership attention on the technical decisions that matter most
- Establish architecture standards, review mechanisms, and decision frameworks that improve quality without slowing teams down
- Create enough discipline to drive coherence, but not so much process that architecture becomes dead weight
- Lead or influence prototyping efforts for new platform capabilities, architectural shifts, and future-state patterns
- Validate important ideas quickly before the company overcommits to bad assumptions
- Partner deeply with engineering leadership and senior engineers
- Raise the technical bar through clarity, credibility, and sound judgment
- Act as a force multiplier, not a bottleneck
Architecture Strategy
Technical Decision Leadership
Governance Without Bureaucracy
Vanguard Engineering & Prototyping
Engineering Influence
What You Bring:
- Deep technical judgment and strong systems thinking
- Ability to reason from first principles and communicate tradeoffs clearly
- Strong understanding of modern SaaS architecture, APIs, distributed systems, data design, and platform evolution
- Ability to balance long-term design with practical delivery needs
- We care less about how many years you’ve been called an architect and more about whether you can actually lead architecture at this level
What We’re Looking For:
- Real technical depth
- High credibility with strong engineers
- Pragmatic, not theoretical
- Can simplify complexity
- Understands AI-native architecture direction
- Wants to shape a company, not just review diagrams
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