Chief Architect

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential workforce technology organization in their search for a Chief Architect. This is a fully remote position open to candidates located anywhere in the world.

Our client is seeking their most senior hands-on technical leader to shape the technical foundation that will power the next decade of product innovation. This is not a strategy-only or advisory role—the Chief Architect must live close to the code, go deep with engineering teams, challenge assumptions, write and review technical designs, and make high-consequence architecture decisions.

This person will own architecture and technical decision-making for the most complex parts of a workforce management platform, including AI, optimization, forecasting, scheduling, distributed systems, data platforms, real-time decisioning, enterprise scalability, security, compliance, and developer productivity.

Responsibilities

Hands-On Architecture and Technical Decision-Making

• Serve as the senior-most hands-on technical authority for complex architecture, system design, and platform evolution
• Personally dive into code, design documents, production incidents, performance bottlenecks, and implementation tradeoffs
• Lead the hardest technical decisions across AI systems, optimization engines, distributed systems, data architecture, reliability, scalability, security, and platform modernization
• Write prototypes, reference implementations, architecture decision records, technical specifications, and design patterns where needed
• Make high-consequence technical decisions with incomplete information, balancing correctness, simplicity, speed, scalability, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability
• Partner directly with Staff, Principal, and senior engineering leaders in design reviews and implementation planning

Platform Architecture and Technical Vision

• Define and own long-term architecture across application services, data infrastructure, ML systems, optimization engines, APIs, integration architecture, and enterprise-scale operations
• Establish engineering-wide standards for system design, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, observability, security, and maintainability
• Serve as the final architectural authority for major platform initiatives and technical decisions with long-term consequences
• Identify opportunities to reduce complexity, improve system efficiency, accelerate engineering velocity, and unlock new product capabilities
• Create pragmatic migration paths from current-state to target-state architecture while maintaining uptime and delivery speed

AI, Optimization, and Decision Systems

• Architect AI-native product capabilities across forecasting, scheduling, labor optimization, recommendations, copilots or agents, anomaly detection, and decision automation
• Define architecture for production AI systems including data pipelines, feature platforms, model training, model serving, retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, and feedback loops
• Make clear build-versus-buy decisions across LLMs, classical ML, optimization solvers, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to turn mathematically complex problems into reliable, scalable, explainable production systems
• Establish standards for AI system quality including accuracy, latency, cost, explainability, drift detection, and reliability

Distributed Systems, Data, and Enterprise Scale

• Drive architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS systems serving complex enterprise customers with high availability, performance, security, and compliance expectations
• Lead technical decisions involving microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed data processing, real-time systems, and large-scale analytics
• Improve architecture for observability, incident analysis, performance engineering, capacity planning, and reliability
• Ensure architectural decisions support global scale, data residency, enterprise integrations, configurability, and extensibility

Engineering Culture and Technical Talent

• Mentor and elevate Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, architects, and senior engineering leaders across the organization
• Raise the bar for technical judgment, system design, architecture reviews, documentation, code quality, and operational discipline
• Help assess, attract, and develop senior technical talent
• Build a culture of disciplined technical thinking, direct debate, clear decision-making, and pragmatic execution

Travel: Up to 15% for leadership collaboration, engineering offsites, and strategic engagements

What We're Looking For

Experience Level

• 15+ years of experience building and scaling large-scale software systems
• Prior experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Principal Architect, or equivalent senior technical leadership role
• Demonstrated success designing and scaling mission-critical, multi-tenant SaaS platforms for enterprise customers
• Deep hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, data platforms, APIs, event-driven systems, and high-availability production environments
• Proven ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader who can credibly engage in code-level and design-level discussions with senior engineers
• Experience making major architecture decisions for systems with high scale, high reliability requirements, complex domain logic, and long product lifecycles
• Experience modernizing large production systems incrementally while maintaining uptime, backward compatibility, and customer trust
• Experience building or supporting AI, ML, optimization, decisioning, forecasting, or data-intensive products in production

Technical Depth

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, cloud architecture, service-oriented or microservices architectures, APIs, event-driven systems, and large-scale data processing
• Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Strong experience with modern engineering practices including architecture reviews, design documents, code reviews, testing strategy, deployment architecture, and observability
• Experience with languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Scala, or similar modern backend languages
• Ability to reason deeply about tradeoffs involving performance, latency, throughput, cost, reliability, developer productivity, extensibility, and maintainability

Leadership and Judgment

• Strong architectural judgment: knows when to simplify, when to re-platform, when to tolerate debt, and when to force a hard technical reset
• Demonstrated ability to make bold technical decisions with incomplete information and drive alignment across senior technical and executive stakeholders
• Ability to influence without relying on hierarchy, while still being willing to make clear decisions when consensus is insufficient
• Strong product and business judgment; able to connect architecture decisions to customer outcomes, implementation speed, product differentiation, and company strategy
• Pragmatic builder mindset: balances long-term architecture with startup speed, customer urgency, and execution realities

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building platforms used by millions of users or supporting very large-scale enterprise operations
• Experience at companies known for large-scale distributed systems, AI, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise SaaS
• Familiarity with optimization engines, scheduling algorithms, forecasting systems, constraint solvers, or mathematically complex production systems
• Experience architecting AI-native product capabilities including LLM-enabled workflows, AI agents or copilots, model evaluation, retrieval systems, and production monitoring
• Experience building internal developer platforms, platform infrastructure, data platforms, ML pipelines, or large-scale analytics systems
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; PhD a plus but not required

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background, technical expertise, and career goals. We'll discuss the role in detail and ensure strong mutual fit before submitting your profile to our client.

If selected to move forward, we'll coordinate the interview process between you and the hiring organization. Throughout the process, we serve as your advocate and main point of contact.

Important: Please apply only through Get A Job.ai. Do not contact the client organization directly, as this may disqualify your application.

Pay

The client organization has indicated a base salary range of $300,000-$385,000 plus bonus and stock equity for this position. Compensation will be based on location, level of experience, education, and specialized knowledge and skills.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, or any other legally protected status under federal, state, or local anti-discrimination laws.