Product Area Lead Architect (EU, UK, US)

About Accelerant

Accelerant is a data-driven risk exchange connecting underwriters of specialty insurance risk with risk capital providers. Accelerant was founded in 2018 by a group of longtime insurance industry executives and technology experts who shared a vision of rebuilding the way risk is exchanged – so that it works better, for everyone. The Accelerant risk exchange does business across more than 20 different countries and 250 specialty products, and we are proud that our insurers have been awarded an AM Best A- (Excellent) rating. For more information, please visit www.accelerant.ai.

Location:Remote

Department:Product & Technology

Reports to:Director of Engineering

Product Area:Insights, Analytics & Workflows

Job Description

Accelerant is seeking aProduct AreaLeadArchitectto provide hands on, operational architectural leadership for our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area. This role operates at aPrincipal level, influencing architecture and execution across multiple autonomous product teams. You will work closely with team architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to ensure teams move fastwithout fragmenting the architecture.

This is not an ivory tower architecture role. It is highly collaborative, pragmatic, and operational, focused on identifying architectural gaps, managing dependencies, and enabling teams to execute confidently within a shared architectural framework. You will championstandards basedarchitecture, leveraging web standards, open protocols, and industry conventions to build interoperable, accessible, and future proof systems.

Key Responsibilities

Operational Architectural Leadership

• Ensure architectural alignment across product teams, partnering closely with team architects and engineering managers

• Proactively identify architectural gaps, technical debt, and qualityrisks;drive resolution through collaboration and influence

• Manage cross team technical dependencies to enable independent, parallel execution

• Translate architectural strategy into clear, actionable guidance that teams can apply sprint by sprint

Cross Team Coordination & Alignment

• Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical conflicts across teams through principled, pragmatic decision making

• Act as an escalation point for complex cross team technical challenges

• Ensure architectural decisions are clearly communicated, understood, and consistently applied

Design and Innovation

• Define and maintain architectural patterns across backend services, APIs, data platforms, andfront endsystems

• Design scalable, resilient systems for analytics, workflow orchestration, and intelligence features

• Guide decomposition of legacy systems intowell definedservices and domains

• Evaluate technologies and data stores, favoring open standards andlong termmaintainability

• Architect distributed systems with focus on reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability

Standards & Governance

• Establish API design standards ensuring consistency, discoverability, and ease of integration

• Define front end standards prioritizing web platform capabilities, progressive enhancement, and accessibility (WCAG)

• Create governance frameworks that balance standardization with team autonomy

• Drive adoption of industry standards (OAuth2, OpenID Connect,OpenTelemetry,JSON:API) over proprietary alternatives

Technical Leadership

• Partner with engineering teams on design reviews, PR reviews, and implementation guidance

• Establish standards for cross cutting concerns: API versioning, auth, observability, error handling, and resiliency patterns

• Collaborate with platform and DevOps teams on containerization, CI/CD, and cloud native deployment

• Produce clear technical design documentation that drives alignment and knowledge sharing

• Mentor engineers and raise the overall architectural maturity of the organization

GenAI, ML & AI Architecture

• Architect customer facing GenAI features using LLMs, including RAG pipelines, prompt engineering frameworks, and conversational AI interfaces

• Define patterns for ML model integration: serving endpoints, API contracts, versioning, and health monitoring

• Partner with Data Science to translate models into production grade features with clear integration contracts and deployment workflows

• Establish standards for responsible AI, including evaluation criteria, privacy guardrails, and LLM output validation

AI Transformation & Productivity Leadership

• Scale AI driven development workflowsacross teams, ensuring engineers leverage AI coding tools effectively

• Guide team architects and coach senior engineerson using AI tools to enhance productivity and code quality

• Work hands on with teams to identify opportunities for AI to solve operational challenges and improve velocity

Solution Evaluation & Quality Assurance

• Evaluate and recommend technologies to enhance capabilities across analytics, workflow, and intelligence domains

• Ensure architectural integrity through code reviews, assessments, and continuous monitoring

• Proactively identify technical risks and devise strategies for reliability, security, and performance

Technical Requirements

Full Stack SaaS Architecture:

• Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js

• Deep knowledge of web platform fundamentals and browser native capabilities

• Experience designing and evolvingwell structuredAPIs for platform integrations

Architectural & Systems Thinking:

• Deep knowledge of architecture principles, design patterns, and distributed systems

• Proven ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs in complex, evolving systems

• Experience in cloud native environments, preferably AWS

AI Enabled Engineering:

• Demonstrated experience using AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.)

• Understanding of AI applications for development productivity and code quality improvement

Qualifications

• 8 to 12+ years in software engineering and architecture roles

• Proven experience operating across multiple agile teams in an architectural leadership capacity

• Track record of managing cross team dependencies and bridging architectural vision withday to dayexecution

• Proven ability to drive AI adoption and transformation within engineering organizations

• Excellent communication and facilitation skills with ability to align work across distributed teams

• Pragmatic, operational mindset with strongproblem solvingabilities

• Bachelor’s orMaster’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Originally posted on Himalayas