Company Overview
[$COMPANY_OVERVIEW]
Role Overview
[$COMPANY_NAME] is seeking an experienced Chief Architect to define and drive the technical strategy for large-scale, mission-critical systems. As Chief Architect you will own cross-domain architecture, enforce global non-functional requirements (scalability, reliability, security, observability), and align engineering teams to a coherent, business-driven technical roadmap. You will translate product and business strategy into architecture decision records (ADRs), reference architectures, and guided implementation plans that enable rapid delivery while reducing systemic risk.
Responsibilities
- Set and steward the enterprise architecture vision: define target-state architectures (cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud), platform boundaries, service decomposition patterns, and migration paths for legacy systems.
- Architect high-scale distributed systems: design for horizontal scalability, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and low-latency data paths using technologies such as Kubernetes, gRPC/HTTP/2, message brokers (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and distributed caches (Redis, Aerospike).
- Establish cross-functional standards: author ADRs, API contracts, interface schemas (OpenAPI/GraphQL), and platform guardrails for CI/CD, observability, security, and cost governance.
- Drive platform and infrastructure decisions: evaluate and recommend IaaS/PaaS patterns (AWS/GCP/Azure), serverless vs containerized trade-offs, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), and storage strategies (Postgres, NewSQL, NoSQL, S3).
- Lead incident reduction and reliability initiatives: define SLOs/SLIs/SLAs, implement distributed tracing, centralized logging, and runbooks; partner with SREs to reduce MTTR and improve incident post-mortems.
- Technical leadership and governance: chair architecture review boards, conduct systematic design reviews, and enforce technical debt repayment strategies across engineering organizations.
- Mentor senior engineers and architects: build a practice for solution architecture, run brown-bag technical reviews, and foster apprenticeship for architecture skills across the engineering organization.
- Collaborate with product and business leadership: translate roadmap priorities into technical investments, produce cost/benefit analyses, and quantify technical risk and ROI for strategic initiatives.
- Vendor and ecosystem evaluation: lead proofs-of-concept for third-party platforms, open source components, and partner integrations; negotiate technical SLAs and integration approaches.
Required and Preferred Qualifications
Required:
- 15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 7 years in architecture, technical leadership, or principal engineer roles.
- Proven track record owning end-to-end architecture for complex, high-throughput systems in production at scale.
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems theory and practice: consensus, partition tolerance, data consistency models, caching strategies, and event-driven design.
- Experience designing microservices and service-oriented architectures, including API versioning, backpressure strategies, and bounded contexts.
- Strong operational mindset: demonstrable experience defining SLOs/SLIs, implementing observability (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger/Zipkin, Prometheus), and reducing operational toil.
- Extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi).
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to produce clear ADRs, architecture diagrams (C4), and executive-level technical roadmaps.
- Track record leading cross-functional technical programs and influencing engineering leadership without direct line management authority.
Preferred:
- Experience with data-intensive architectures: OLTP/OLAP, streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis), real-time analytics, and data mesh patterns.
- Background in security architecture, zero-trust networking, and compliance standards (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR).
- Familiarity with machine learning infrastructure and model deployment at scale (TF Serving, Seldon, Kubeflow).
- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field or equivalent industrial experience.
- Relevant certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, TOGAF, or equivalent.
Technical Skills and Relevant Technologies
- Systems & platforms: Kubernetes, Docker, Istio/Linkerd (service mesh), serverless architectures (Lambda/GCF).
- Backend & data: Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python; Spring Boot or equivalent frameworks; Postgres, MySQL, CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka, Redis.
- API & integration: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, OpenAPI, asynchronous messaging patterns.
- Infrastructure & automation: Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab CI, GitOps practices.
- Observability & operations: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, DataDog, New Relic.
- Security & governance: OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS, Secrets Management (Vault), IAM best practices.
- Testing & quality: contract testing (Pact), chaos engineering (ChaosMesh/ChaosMonkey), performance testing (Gatling, JMeter).
Soft Skills and Cultural Fit
- Strategic thinker who can map long-term technical direction to near-term engineering deliverables.
- Track record of leading ADRs, conducting rigorous architecture reviews, and mentoring senior technical staff.
- Exceptional stakeholder management: able to communicate trade-offs and drive consensus across product, engineering, security, and executive teams.
- Data-driven decision-maker: uses metrics, capacity planning, and cost analysis to justify architecture choices.
- Inclusive leadership style: committed to psychological safety, diverse hiring, and developing underrepresented engineers.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, high-growth environments while establishing repeatable engineering practices.
Benefits and Perks
Salary: [$SALARY_RANGE]
- Equity participation and competitive long-term incentive programs.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage; flexible benefits to support family needs.
- Generous PTO, parental leave, and sabbatical program for long-tenured employees.
- Professional development stipend, conference credits, and paid certifications.
- Home office or co-location allowance and ergonomic equipment reimbursement.
- Flexible working hours and an emphasis on work-life balance.
Equal Opportunity Statement
[$COMPANY_NAME] is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds and experience levels to apply, including those who may not meet every listed requirement.
Location
This is a remote position within [$COMPANY_LOCATION]. Candidates must be authorized to work and located within [$COMPANY_LOCATION] to be considered. Occasional travel to regional offices or customer sites may be required.
How to Apply
To apply, submit your resume and a brief cover letter describing a major architecture decision you led, the trade-offs considered, and the outcome. We encourage applicants who do not meet every requirement but have demonstrated the ability to learn and lead to apply.