About the Opportunity

The Chief Architect is responsible for defining the technical architecture of the company’s product landscape and future.

This role will shape how the company moves from a portfolio of products and legacy architecture into a more coherent, unified, AI-enabled platform. You will define target-state architecture, identify the highest-value technical interventions, guide major technical decisions, and help engineering leadership make better long-term tradeoffs.

This is not an ivory tower architecture role. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can combine first-principles technical thinking with practical execution. You must be able to see the future clearly enough to drive toward it and stay grounded enough to help teams ship.

Success means sharper technical direction, fewer fragmented decisions, better platform coherence, stronger architectural integrity, and a credible path from today’s complexity to tomorrow’s platform.

About the Team

You will report to the CTO and work closely with Product Engineering, Product Flow, VP of AI, platform leaders, and senior engineers. You may lead a Vanguard Engineering capability focused on prototyping and validating future-state architecture and leading the charge delivering the hardest to architect and build product areas.

What You’ll Do:

Architecture Strategy
- Define the target-state architecture for the company’s platform evolution
- Drive architectural direction across APIs, services, integration patterns, data, identity, and AI-enabled capabilities
- Help the company move from fragmented systems toward a more coherent platform model
Technical Decision Leadership
- Guide major architectural decisions with clear reasoning, tradeoff analysis, and pragmatic recommendations
- Identify architectural bottlenecks, duplication, scaling risks, and structural weaknesses
- Focus leadership attention on the technical decisions that matter most
Governance Without Bureaucracy
- Establish architecture standards, review mechanisms, and decision frameworks that improve quality without slowing teams down
- Create enough discipline to drive coherence, but not so much process that architecture becomes dead weight
Vanguard Engineering & Prototyping
- Lead or influence prototyping efforts for new platform capabilities, architectural shifts, and future-state patterns
- Validate important ideas quickly before the company overcommits to bad assumptions
Engineering Influence
- Partner deeply with engineering leadership and senior engineers
- Raise the technical bar through clarity, credibility, and sound judgment
- Act as a force multiplier, not a bottleneck

What You Bring:

Deep technical judgment and strong systems thinking
Ability to reason from first principles and communicate tradeoffs clearly
Strong understanding of modern SaaS architecture, APIs, distributed systems, data design, and platform evolution
Ability to balance long-term design with practical delivery needs
We care less about how many years you’ve been called an architect and more about whether you can actually lead architecture at this level

What We’re Looking For:

Real technical depth
High credibility with strong engineers
Pragmatic, not theoretical
Can simplify complexity
Understands AI-native architecture direction
Wants to shape a company, not just review diagrams

Why You’ll Love Working Here:

Make an impact: Your work will directly shape how thousands of employees experience total rewards at Employ — ensuring programs that attract, engage, and retain top talent across the globe.
Meaningful, mission-driven work: Join a team where operational excellence in HR directly supports Employ’s mission to improve hiring outcomes for both people and businesses.
Remote-first culture: Work from where you’re most productive while staying connected to a collaborative, high-energy team through virtual-first rituals and regular in-person meetups.
Unlimited PTO: Trust-based time off so you can recharge and bring your best self to work.
Comprehensive benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage to support you and your family’s health and well-being.
Learning & development programs: Access to training, mentorship, and development resources to grow your skills — from HR operations to total rewards strategy.