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Aiven is re-establishing a dedicated Architecture function to own the hardest, longest-horizon technical decisions across its cloud data platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role—not a management position—that serves as the technical anchor for the Architecture function, driving the company's 10x scaling initiative and coordinating complex technical evolution across service domains.
You will set technical direction for cross-domain architecture initiatives that no single service team owns, particularly the 10x scaling effort and related long-horizon platform decisions. You'll design and drive the most complex, high-risk technical changes impacting the whole company, working as a hands-on contributor rather than delegating the hardest problems. You'll maintain deep, current hands-on technical expertise sufficient to personally write, debug, and review the most difficult systems designs and code in the areas this role touches.
Key responsibilities include identifying and resolving architectural conflicts or misalignment between service domains, making binding technical calls where domains would otherwise diverge or duplicate effort. You'll coordinate complex technical evolution efforts spanning multiple domains and multi-quarter timelines, ensuring changes land coherently. You'll act as the senior technical authority and point of escalation for architecture decisions requiring deep systems expertise and cross-team credibility to resolve.
You'll partner with engineering leads and executive team members across domains to translate strategic direction and scaling targets into concrete, sequenced technical roadmaps. You'll also mentor and raise the technical bar of senior engineers working on cross-domain problems, without formal management responsibility.
Aiven is a global team of over 400 people working to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. The company provides a cloud data platform making open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to developers and builders.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Track record of operating at Staff/Senior Staff/Principal level (or equivalent) in distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering, ideally at a large-scale operation
- Demonstrated ability to both set architectural direction across teams and personally deliver deep technical work
- Experience resolving architectural disagreements between teams that don't share a manager, and earning buy-in through technical credibility rather than positional authority
- Comfort operating with significant ambiguity on multi-quarter, cross-domain initiatives where the roadmap is being defined as the work happens
- Strong written and verbal communication; ability to translate deep technical judgment into direction that engineering leads and executives can act on
- Nice-to-have: Prior experience in an architecture function (rather than a purely product-engineering role)
