Chief Architect

Showpad • Boston, MA

5d

About The Position

Showpad is the leader in revenue effectiveness, helping organizations in complex, field-driven industries turn strategy into execution and execution into measurable growth. Purpose-built for industrial organizations such as those in manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, and medical device companies, Showpad’s AI-native platform unifies content management, sales readiness, buyer engagement, and revenue intelligence into a single system of execution. Powered by GenieAI and grounded in trusted first-party data, Showpad enables revenue teams to automate workflows, scale winning behaviors, and reclaim lost revenue across every customer interaction. More than 2,000 global organizations rely on Showpad to drive consistent, high-impact performance in the field. Built for effectiveness and recognized for excellence, Showpad is consistently named a Leader by Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Aragon, and backed by 2,500+ five-star reviews on G2 and Gartner Peer Insights.

Requirements

• 15+ years of industry experience, with substantial depth in B2B SaaS.
• Has 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).
• Has 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.
• Works seamlessly across Product, Technology and GTM without formal authority, building the trust that makes influence possible.
• Constructively collaborative but firm — anchored in a fact-based belief system, willing to hold a position on the evidence and equally willing to change it on better evidence.
• Senior-level gravitas and presence, with the judgment and polish to present to the executive leadership team and the board.
• Able to express complex technical concepts in a genuinely consumable way, calibrated to the audience — board member, customer executive, product manager or engineer.
• Comfortable partnering with a deeply technical CEO and going as far down into the technology underpinnings as the conversation requires.

Nice To Haves

• 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 that demonstrates architectural thinking.
• Familiarity with security-by-design, SOC 2, and compliance-aware architecture.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the overall architectural direction across multiple products, defining the target-state platform architecture and the pragmatic path from where each product is today.
• Chair and run the ARB — establishing standards, reference architectures, decision records and review cadence, and making it a forum engineers actively bring work to rather than a gate they route around.
• Embed directly in the development process where complex deliverables require an architecture or design runway ahead of execution, and stay engaged through delivery rather than handing off a document.
• Represent Showpad's technology to customers and prospects — architecture, security and AI deep dives, plus the product and commercial context that makes them land with an economic buyer.
• 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 both cost and execution — including global team topology, build/buy decisions and skill mix.
• Establish the practices, guardrails and observability that keep AI inference, AI-assisted development and cloud operating costs predictable and defensible as we scale.
• Set the standard for business-aware technical excellence — engineering judgment that is rigorous about quality and equally rigorous about cost, time-to-value and customer outcome.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed