The posting
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, Sterling, VA, or Nashville, TN or areas commutable to these locations strongly preferred. Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Chief Architect
The Chief Architect is the senior technical authority for software architecture across Asurion’s production platforms, reporting to the CTO. This is a hands-on software architecture role rather than an enterprise architecture function: it requires current, practitioner-level judgment earned building and operating systems in high-traffic, high-volume production environments. Sets architectural direction and standards for how services are designed, built, secured, deployed, and operated, and holds final decision rights on architecture that spans teams. Leads a small team of architects while influencing a much larger engineering organization laterally, through credibility rather than reporting lines. Reasons about long-term technology direction, including artificial intelligence strategy, open-source model adoption, and research and development investment, and connects architectural choices to business outcomes.
Essential Job Skills/Duties
- Set and own software architecture direction for high-traffic, high-volume production platforms, remaining hands-on in design reviews, prototypes, and critical implementation decisions.
- Responsible for supporting cross-team architecture projects to completion, ensuring it meets standards for security, reliability, and maintainability.
- Chair an architecture review forum and maintain auditable architecture decision records so that trade-offs and their rationale are durable.
- Establish and maintain design patterns, service standards, and reference implementations, and drive adoption through engagement with delivery teams rather than mandate.
- Embed security by design into architecture and the development lifecycle from inception, defining what good looks like and making the secure path the default path.
- Set reliability and performance engineering standards at scale, including service level objectives, observability, capacity and load planning, failure-mode analysis, and resilience patterns.
- Partner to define and deploy delivery engineering standards spanning CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, progressive delivery, and release safety.
- Lead architectural diagnosis and remediation for significant production incidents, converting findings into durable design change.
- Own the technical debt strategy: identify architecture that constrains the business, quantify the impact, and sequence remediation into delivery roadmaps.
- Guide build-versus-buy and platform selection decisions and advise executive leadership on long-term technology direction.
- Shape artificial intelligence strategy from an architecture standpoint, including open-source model adoption, build-versus-buy for AI capabilities, and research and development investment priorities.
- Partner with the Data Architect and infrastructure leaders on data and platform decisions, integrating their depth rather than duplicating it.
- Connect architectural decisions to business outcomes — cost, speed, risk, and customer experience — for engineering and executive audiences alike.
Required Technical Skills
- Hands-on software architecture and design of distributed systems operating at high traffic and high volume in production.
- Deep, practitioner-level DevOps expertise across CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automation, and release engineering. This is a core requirement of the role.
- Security by design, including threat modeling, secure development lifecycle, identity and access patterns, encryption, and secrets management.
- Reliability and performance engineering at scale: service level objectives, observability, load and capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, and incident recovery.
- Service oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, and API-first integration design, including versioning and backward compatibility.
- Cloud-native architecture on a major public cloud, including containerization and orchestration.
- Working knowledge of infrastructure, networking, and data architecture sufficient to make sound cross-layer decisions and partner effectively with specialists.
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning architecture, including model serving, retrieval patterns, agent guardrails, and open-source model evaluation.
- Legacy modernization applied to live systems: monolith decomposition, incremental migration, and strangler patterns.
- Engineering cost efficiency, including cloud cost optimization and the architectural levers that drive run rate.
- Code-level fluency sufficient to review critical designs and implementations credibly.
Required Soft/Leadership Skills
- High emotional intelligence; reads organizational dynamics and adapts approach accordingly.
- Influences laterally through credibility and expertise rather than reporting authority.
- Declines proposals constructively, redirecting teams toward better outcomes without alienating them.
- Brings engineers and leaders along through architectural change; holds firm on standards without being directive for its own sake.
- Communicates fluently with technical and business audiences, translating architecture into cost, risk, speed, and customer impact.
- Builds alignment across product, engineering, security, and operations, and decides when consensus is not reachable.
- Mentors and grows architects and senior engineers, raising the architectural bar across the organization.
Required Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant industry work experience.
- Fifteen or more years in software engineering and architecture, including seven or more years architecting systems at production scale.
- Demonstrated hands-on architecture and engineering in high-traffic, high-volume production environments; experience limited to prototypes, pilots, or demonstration environments only does not meet this requirement.
- Demonstrated experience inheriting, diagnosing, and remediating architecture that failed or constrained the business at scale.
- Experience owning reliability and performance for mission-critical services, including leading recovery from significant production failures.
- Deep DevOps and delivery engineering experience, applied as a practitioner and not solely as a standard setter.
- Experience leading architects or senior engineers, including direct people leadership of a small team.
- Demonstrated ability to influence senior engineering and business stakeholders without formal authority.
Preferred Education & Experience
- Master’s degree in computer science or software engineering.
- Experience in consumer technology, device protection, insurance, or telecommunications at consumer scale is a plus.
- Experience evaluating and adopting open-source artificial intelligence models and shaping research and development investment.
- Track record measurably improving reliability, performance, or run-rate technology cost.
- Experience establishing or maturing an architecture practice and review function.
Preferred Licenses/Certifications
- Professional-level cloud architect certification (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud).
- Kubernetes certification such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator.
Supervisory Responsibilities
- Leads a small architecture team.
- Sets goals, performance standards, architectural competency expectations, and succession plans for the team.
- Exercises architecture decision rights across engineering teams that do not report into this role.
- Mentors architects and senior engineers organization-wide through influence rather than reporting lines.
Travel Requirements
- Travels: Business travel for leadership, partner, and vendor meetings.
- % of Time: Up to 25 percent annually.
- Overnight Travel: Occasional overnight travel required.
