Chief Architect

Asurion

About The Position

The Chief Architect is Asurion’s senior technical authority for software architecture across its production platforms and reports to the Chief Technology Officer. This is a hands-on software architecture role focused on building and operating high-traffic, high-volume production systems, not an enterprise architecture function. The role sets architectural direction and standards for how services are designed, built, secured, deployed, and operated, and holds final architecture decision rights for work spanning teams. It leads a small architecture team and influences a broader engineering organization through technical credibility and collaboration. The Chief Architect guides long-term technology direction, including artificial intelligence strategy, open-source model adoption, and research and development investment, and connects technical decisions to business outcomes. The position partners with data and infrastructure specialists, supports cross-team architecture initiatives, and establishes practices for security, reliability, performance, delivery engineering, and technical debt. It also leads architectural diagnosis and remediation for significant production incidents and advises executive leadership on platform selection and build-versus-buy decisions. The position is based in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, Sterling, Virginia, or Nashville, Tennessee. Business travel for leadership, partner, and vendor meetings is required, up to 25 percent annually, with occasional overnight travel.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant industry work experience.
Fifteen or more years in software engineering and architecture, including seven or more years architecting systems at production scale.
Hands-on software architecture and design of distributed systems operating at high traffic and high volume in production.
Demonstrated hands-on architecture and engineering in high-traffic, high-volume production environments; experience limited to prototypes, pilots, or demonstrations does not meet this requirement.
Deep practitioner-level DevOps expertise across CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automation, and release engineering.
Security-by-design experience, including threat modeling, secure development lifecycle, identity and access patterns, encryption, and secrets management.
Reliability and performance engineering at scale, including service level objectives, observability, load and capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, and incident recovery.
Knowledge of service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, and API-first integration design, including versioning and backward compatibility.
Cloud-native architecture experience on a major public cloud, including containerization and orchestration.
Working knowledge of infrastructure, networking, and data architecture sufficient to make cross-layer decisions and partner with specialists.
Knowledge of AI and machine learning architecture, including model serving, retrieval patterns, agent guardrails, and open-source model evaluation.
Experience modernizing live legacy systems, including monolith decomposition, incremental migration, and strangler patterns.
Knowledge of engineering cost efficiency, cloud cost optimization, and architectural factors affecting operating costs.
Code-level fluency sufficient to credibly review critical designs and implementations.
High emotional intelligence and ability to read organizational dynamics and adapt approach accordingly.
Ability to influence laterally through credibility and expertise rather than reporting authority.
Ability to decline proposals constructively and redirect teams toward better outcomes without alienating them.
Ability to bring engineers and leaders along through architectural change and maintain standards without being unnecessarily directive.
Ability to communicate with technical and business audiences and translate architecture into cost, risk, speed, and customer impact.
Ability to build alignment across product, engineering, security, and operations, and decide when consensus is not reachable.
Experience inheriting, diagnosing, and remediating architecture that failed or constrained a business at scale.
Experience owning reliability and performance for mission-critical services, including leading recovery from significant production failures.
Deep DevOps and delivery engineering experience applied as a practitioner, not solely as a standard setter.
Experience leading architects or senior engineers, including direct people leadership of a small team.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior engineering and business stakeholders without formal authority.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in computer science or software engineering.
Experience in consumer technology, device protection, insurance, or telecommunications at consumer scale.
Experience evaluating and adopting open-source AI models and shaping research and development investment.
Track record of measurably improving reliability, performance, or run-rate technology cost.
Experience establishing or maturing an architecture practice and review function.
Professional-level cloud architect certification (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud).
Kubernetes certification, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator.

Responsibilities

Set and own software architecture direction for high-traffic, high-volume production platforms, remaining hands-on in design reviews, prototypes, and critical implementation decisions.
Support cross-team architecture projects through completion and ensure they meet standards for security, reliability, and maintainability.
Chair an architecture review forum and maintain auditable architecture decision records documenting trade-offs and rationale.
Establish and maintain design patterns, service standards, and reference implementations, and encourage adoption through engagement with delivery teams.
Embed security by design into architecture and the development lifecycle, defining standards and making secure approaches the default.
Set reliability and performance engineering standards, including service level objectives, observability, capacity and load planning, failure-mode analysis, and resilience patterns.
Partner to define and deploy delivery engineering standards spanning CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, progressive delivery, and release safety.
Lead architectural diagnosis and remediation for significant production incidents and turn findings into durable design changes.
Own the technical debt strategy by identifying architecture that constrains the business, quantifying its impact, and sequencing remediation into delivery roadmaps.
Guide build-versus-buy and platform selection decisions and advise executive leadership on long-term technology direction.
Shape AI architecture strategy, including open-source model adoption, build-versus-buy decisions for AI capabilities, and R&D investment priorities.
Partner with the Data Architect and infrastructure leaders on data and platform decisions, integrating their expertise.
Explain architectural decisions in terms of business outcomes such as cost, speed, risk, and customer experience to engineering and executive audiences.
Lead a small architecture team; set goals, performance standards, architectural competency expectations, and succession plans.
Exercise architecture decision rights across engineering teams outside the role’s reporting line.
Mentor architects and senior engineers across the organization and raise architectural capabilities through influence.