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Showpad is seeking a Chief Architect to set and steward the architectural direction of its entire product portfolio. This is a deeply technical and deeply cross-functional role reporting to the CTO, where you will define target-state architecture, establish technical standards, and serve as a principal technical partner across the organization.
Key responsibilities include:
• Portfolio Architecture: Own and lead overall architectural direction across multiple products, defining target-state platform architecture and pragmatic paths from current state.
• Architecture Review Board: Chair and run the ARB, establishing standards, reference architectures, decision records, and review cadence to make it a forum engineers actively bring work to.
• Architecture and Design Runways: Embed directly in development processes for complex deliverables, staying engaged through delivery rather than handing off documents.
• Customer Engagement: Represent Showpad's technology to customers and prospects—architecture, security, and AI deep dives with product and commercial context.
• Technology Transformation: Lead modernization of complex, dated products in the portfolio; assess, sequence, de-risk, and drive multi-year transformation without stalling the roadmap.
• Staffing and Operating Models: Recommend staffing and sourcing models to the CTO that are efficient on cost and execution, including global team topology and build/buy decisions.
• AI and Cloud Economics: Establish practices, guardrails, and observability to keep AI inference, AI-assisted development, and cloud operating costs predictable and defensible as the company scales.
• Role Model: 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.
You will spend time in design reviews and equally in rooms with Product, GTM, customers, executive leadership, and the board—expected to be credible and additive in all contexts.
Requirements:
• 15+ years of industry experience with substantial depth in B2B SaaS.
• 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).
• 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.
• Demonstrated depth designing AI-centric systems that actually shipped in product—not prototypes, pilots, or strategy decks.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 demonstrating 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; constructively collaborative but firm, anchored in fact-based belief systems; senior-level gravitas and presence with judgment and polish to present to executive leadership and the board; able to express complex technical concepts in consumable ways calibrated to audience; comfortable partnering with a deeply technical CEO.
