SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Showpad is a leader in revenue effectiveness, helping organizations in complex, field-driven industries (manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, medical devices) turn strategy into execution and execution into measurable growth. The company's AI-native platform unifies content management, sales readiness, buyer engagement, and revenue intelligence into a single system of execution. Showpad is recognized as a Leader by Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Aragon, with 2,500+ five-star reviews.
As Chief Architect, you will set and steward the architectural direction of Showpad's entire product portfolio. You are the CTO's principal technical partner, defining target-state architecture, sequencing the runway to get there, holding the bar on technical quality, and making the economics of AI and cloud a first-class design consideration.
Key responsibilities include:
• Own and lead overall architectural direction across multiple products, defining target-state platform architecture and the pragmatic path from where each product is today.
• Chair and run the Architecture Review Board (ARB), establishing standards, reference architectures, decision records and review cadence, making it a forum engineers actively bring work to rather than a gate they route around.
• Embed directly in the development process where complex deliverables require an architecture or design runway ahead of execution, staying engaged through delivery rather than handing off a document.
• Represent Showpad's technology to customers and prospects — architecture, security and AI deep dives, plus the product and commercial context that makes them land with an economic buyer.
• Lead modernization of complex, dated products in the portfolio: assess, sequence, de-risk and drive multi-year transformation without stalling the roadmap.
• Recommend staffing and sourcing models to the CTO that are efficient on both cost and execution — including global team topology, build/buy decisions and skill mix.
• Establish the practices, guardrails and observability that keep AI inference, AI-assisted development and cloud operating costs predictable and defensible as the company scales.
• Set the standard for business-aware technical excellence — engineering judgment that is rigorous about quality and equally rigorous about cost, time-to-value and customer outcome.
The role is deeply technical and deeply cross-functional. You will spend time in design reviews and equally in rooms with Product, GTM, customers, the executive leadership team and the board — and you will be expected to be credible and additive in all of them.
REQUIREMENTS:
Experience:
• 15+ years of industry experience, with substantial depth in B2B SaaS.
• Has led architecture and development for large-scale enterprise products — multi-tenant, security- and compliance-sensitive, with demanding enterprise customers.
• Deep, demonstrable expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native SaaS architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Proven track record working with and through globally distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.
• Experience establishing architecture practices across multi-team engineering orgs (RFCs, ADRs, design reviews).
• Has owned and delivered significant technical transformation or modernization inside a matrix organization, with influence rather than direct authority over much of the surface area.
• Management experience leading teams of 10–25 people directly, while remaining hands-on and technically current.
Technical Depth:
• Modern AI architecture: Demonstrated depth designing AI-centric systems that actually shipped in product — not prototypes, pilots or strategy decks.
• Generative AI: Deeply conversant and hands-on across the modern GenAI stack: foundation models and model selection, RAG and retrieval architecture, embeddings and vector stores, agentic patterns and tool use, orchestration frameworks, fine-tuning and adaptation, evaluation and guardrails, and latency/quality/cost trade-offs.
• Cloud architecture: Expert-level cloud architecture and operations, including infrastructure as code, modern CI/CD and deployment pipelines, containers and orchestration, observability, resilience and multi-region design.
• Cost management: Real expertise in the cost side of modern engineering — AI inference and token economics, the cost of AI-assisted development, and cloud operational spend — with a track record of moving unit economics in the right direction.
Nice to Have:
• Experience in B2B SaaS, multi-tenant platforms, or sales enablement / GTM tech.
• Background in platform/developer-experience engineering.
• Open-source contributions or public technical writing that demonstrates architectural thinking.
• Familiarity with security-by-design, SOC 2, and compliance-aware architecture.
Personal Qualities:
• Works seamlessly across Product, Technology and GTM without formal authority, building the trust that makes influence possible.
• Constructively collaborative but firm — anchored in a fact-based belief system, willing to hold a position on the evidence and equally willing to change it on better evidence.
• Senior-level gravitas and presence, with the judgment and polish to present to the executive leadership team and the board.
• Able to express complex technical concepts in a genuinely consumable way, calibrated to the audience — board member, customer executive, product manager or engineer.
• Comfortable partnering with a deeply technical CEO and going as far down into the technology underpinnings as the conversation requires.
