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 overn