Chief Architect

Skills

About the Role

As Chief Architect, you will serve as Legion's most senior hands-on technical leader, staying close to the code while shaping the technical foundation for the next decade of product innovation. You will personally dive into code, design documents, production incidents, and performance bottlenecks to diagnose root causes and guide technical direction. You'll write prototypes, reference implementations, architecture decision records, and technical specifications to unblock teams. You'll define and own the long-term architecture across application services, data infrastructure, ML systems, optimization engines, APIs, and enterprise-scale operations. You'll architect AI-native product capabilities including forecasting, scheduling, labor optimization, and AI agents, while making build-versus-buy decisions across LLMs, classical ML, and optimization solvers. You'll drive architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS systems serving enterprise customers, and own the architectural approach to enterprise security, compliance, and data governance. You'll also mentor Staff and Principal Engineers, raise the bar for technical judgment across the organization, and help attract and develop senior technical talent. Expect up to 15% travel for leadership collaboration and strategic customer engagements.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience building and scaling large-scale software systems
• Prior experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Principal Architect, or very senior Principal Engineer
• Demonstrated success designing and scaling mission-critical, multi-tenant SaaS platforms for enterprise customers
• Deep hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and data platforms
• Proven ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader engaging in code-level and design-level discussions
• Experience making major architecture decisions for high-scale, high-reliability systems
• Experience modernizing large production systems incrementally while maintaining uptime
• Experience building or supporting AI, ML, optimization, decisioning, or forecasting products in production
• Strong understanding of observability, incident response, and performance engineering
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to engineering teams, executives, and customers
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, and cloud architecture
• Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Strong experience with modern engineering practices including architecture reviews and code reviews
• Experience with languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, or Scala
• Ability to reason deeply about tradeoffs involving performance, latency, and cost
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field

Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior-most hands-on technical authority for complex architecture and system design
• Dive into code, design documents, production incidents, and performance bottlenecks to diagnose root causes
• Lead the hardest technical decisions across AI systems, optimization engines, distributed systems, and platform modernization
• Write prototypes, reference implementations, architecture decision records, and technical specifications
• Make high-consequence technical decisions with incomplete information
• Challenge architectural drift, unnecessary complexity, and weak abstractions
• Partner with Staff, Principal, and senior engineering leaders in design reviews and implementation planning
• Define and own the long-term architecture for the AI-driven Workforce Management platform
• Establish engineering-wide standards for system design, scalability, performance, and observability
• Serve as the final architectural authority for major platform initiatives
• Identify opportunities to reduce complexity and accelerate engineering velocity
• Surface technical debt and architectural risk before they compound
• Create pragmatic migration paths from current-state to target-state architecture
• Architect AI-native product capabilities across forecasting, scheduling, and labor optimization
• Define the architecture for production AI systems including data pipelines and model serving
• Make build-versus-buy decisions across LLMs, classical ML, and optimization solvers
• Partner with Product and Data Science to turn optimization problems into production systems
• Establish standards for AI system quality including accuracy, latency, and explainability
• Drive architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS systems for enterprise customers
• Lead technical decisions involving microservices, APIs, and event-driven architecture
• Improve architecture for observability, incident analysis, and capacity planning
• Connect technical decisions to customer value and product velocity
• Mentor and elevate Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and architects
• Help assess, attract, and develop senior technical talent
• Own the architectural approach to enterprise security, data governance, and compliance
• Ensure architecture supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, data residency, and tenant isolation
• Travel up to 15% for leadership collaboration and strategic customer engagements

Benefits

• $0 monthly premium and other flexible medical, dental, and vision plans effective on the first day of employment
• 401k plan
• Discretionary Paid Time Off and Paid Holidays
• Parental Leave
• Equity
• Monthly Wellness Reimbursement
• Monthly Lunch on Legion