Chief Architect

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.