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Showpad is seeking a Chief Architect to set and steward the architectural direction of its entire product portfolio. You will be the CTO's principal technical partner, defining target-state architecture, sequencing the modernization runway, holding the bar on technical quality, and embedding AI and cloud economics as first-class design considerations.
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—expected to be credible and additive in all contexts.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own and lead overall architectural direction across multiple products, defining target-state platform architecture and pragmatic paths from current state
- Chair and run the Architecture Review Board, establishing standards, reference architectures, decision records, and review cadence
- Embed directly in the development process for complex deliverables requiring architecture or design runways, staying engaged through delivery
- Represent Showpad's technology to customers and prospects—architecture, security, and AI deep dives with product and commercial context
- 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 cost and execution, including global team topology and build/buy decisions
- Establish practices, guardrails, and observability to keep AI inference, AI-assisted development, and cloud operating costs predictable and defensible at scale
- Set the standard for business-aware technical excellence—engineering judgment rigorous about quality and equally rigorous about cost, time-to-value, and customer outcome
Why This Role Matters:
Two strong companies have become one platform opportunity. Decisions made over the next 24 months on AI architecture, modernization sequencing, and build/run costs will shape Showpad's product for the next decade, with an unusually direct line between architectural craft and company outcome.
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
