The posting
About Backblaze
Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we're helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.
Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $125M in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.
Role Overview
Backblaze is seeking a Director, Enterprise Systems & Architecture to own the technical vision, architecture, and operations of the company’s enterprise systems and emerging AI use cases. This is a senior leadership role with organization-wide scope — spanning commercial and financial systems, GTM technology, data architecture, and the deployment and governance of AI agents across the business.
This leader will serve as the company’s architectural authority for enterprise platforms including Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, Snowflake, and their surrounding integration ecosystem. Equally important, they will support the governed infrastructure layer that enables AI agents, automated workflows, and headless capabilities to operate safely at a public company. They will partner closely with the CRO, CISO, and CFO organizations to enable velocity while ensuring systems are compliant, auditable, and built to scale.
The ideal candidate combines deep enterprise architecture expertise with hands-on platform engineering instincts and practical experience deploying AI agents in production environments. This is a build-and-operate role, not a purely advisory one. The Director will directly manage the Salesforce administration team and the NetSuite techno-functional team, and will grow a broader platform capability over time.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture Strategy
- Define and maintain the enterprise systems architecture roadmap across the commercial, financial, and GTM technology stack, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, Snowflake, and related platforms.
- Own and maintain formal architecture documentation including system topology maps, data flow diagrams, integration inventories, and architecture decision records (ADRs).
- Establish and enforce architectural governance standards and review processes for all material system changes across the enterprise.
- Define reference architectures and design patterns for integrations, data exchange, platform extensibility, and AI agent workloads.
- Lead build vs. buy evaluations and establish platform selection criteria — including for AI tooling, agent orchestration frameworks, and LLMOps infrastructure — aligned with long-term architectural goals.
- Ensure systems architecture supports scalability, data integrity, security, and operational efficiency in a public-company environment.
Systems Architecture & Integration Design
- Serve as the lead architect for the design and implementation of integrations across Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, Snowflake, Orb, and other enterprise platforms.
- Establish and enforce design standards, data contracts, and integration governance across all enterprise systems.
- Own the enterprise architecture review board, evaluating proposed system changes for scalability, compliance, security, and alignment with long-term design goals.
- Define integration patterns (event-driven, API-first, middleware) and ensure consistent application across the technology ecosystem.
- Partner with the Data Engineering team to ensure data pipelines, data models, and platform integrations reflect sound architectural principles and support reliable analytical and operational outcomes.
- Lead evaluation and selection of new technologies, including iPaaS and middleware platforms, ensuring alignment with the broader architecture.
Architecture Governance & Advisory
- Serve as the company's technical authority on enterprise systems design questions, providing architectural guidance to Revenue Operations, Finance, and Data Engineering leadership.
- Lead architecture review sessions and provide formal design approval for major system initiatives and platform changes.
- Produce and maintain architectural roadmaps, standards documentation, and technical decision frameworks that guide delivery teams and stakeholders.
- Translate complex business requirements into scalable, future-proof architectural solutions, ensuring alignment between business priorities and technical design decisions.
- Establish strong feedback loops with business teams to ensure the architecture evolves alongside organizational needs.
- Mature the infrastructure that governs AI agent workflows — ensuring all agents and automated systems operate through governed identity, API gateway, secrets management, logging, and reconciliation layers.
- Maintain and enforce change management standards for workflow deployments, prompt changes, and policy updates — including GitHub-backed version control and CI/CD deployment gates.
- Ensure AI agent operations comply with SOX IT General Controls, data privacy requirements (GDPR/CCPA), and internal data governance standards.
- Build and maintain observability infrastructure in partnership with the security team for agent operations, including real-time dashboards, alerting on anomalous behavior, and audit trail evidence for SOX and compliance purposes.
Team Leadership & Vendor Governance
- Lead and develop a team of Business Systems administrators, contractors, providing mentorship and clear career development direction.
- Establish best practices for systems lifecycle management, change management, and project delivery.
- Manage vendor and contractor relationships, ensuring external resources operate within defined architectural standards and governance frameworks.
- Champion a culture of technical rigor, documentation discipline, and continuous improvement across the team.
Qualifications
Required
- 10+ years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, Business Systems, or Platform Engineering roles, with demonstrated ownership of multi-system environments at a public or compliance-regulated company.
- Proven experience deploying, monitoring, and governing AI agents or LLM-powered workflows in production, including prompt versioning, agent identity management, and audit logging.
- Deep experience architecting and governing Salesforce CRM environments at scale, including data model design, integration patterns, and access controls.
- Strong working knowledge of NetSuite and Snowflake from both an architectural and operational perspective.
- Experience building and operating API gateway, secrets management, and identity-based access control infrastructure in support of automated workflows or agent systems.
- Solid understanding of SOX IT General Controls and application controls, with experience producing control evidence in a public company environment within the last 3 years.
- Proven track record managing multi-functional business systems or platform teams, including direct management of admins and techno-functional resources.
- Experience designing integration architectures using event-driven, API-first, or middleware patterns.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to engage credibly across technical teams, senior business leaders, and external auditors.
- Experience with workflow versioning, GitOps patterns, and CI/CD pipelines for business systems deployments.
Preferred
- Proficiency with architecture and security frameworks to enable the responsible usage of AI
- Hands-on experience with iPaaS or middleware platforms (e.g., Fivetran, Polytomic, MuleSoft, Boomi, Celigo) at a design and governance level.
- Experience developing master data management (MDM) strategy and data governance frameworks.
- Experience managing analytics architecture and BI platforms such as Tableau.
- Salesforce and NetSuite certifications.
- Experience working in public or large enterprise technology environments with compliance and audit requirements.
At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
