Chief Technical Architect, Engineering (IC Role)

QAD

26d • Onsite

About The Position

QAD is hiring a Chief Technical Architect to own the architecture of its enterprise-scale SaaS platform and Agentic AI initiatives. This is a deeply technical individual-contributor leadership role, not a people-management position. The architect will set the platform's technical direction, translate company strategy into a multi-year roadmap, align architecture across product pillars, and influence a broad engineering community while working directly with the CTO and product leadership.

The role encompasses architecture for multi-tenant, multi-region platform services; cloud-native systems; data platforms; and production GenAI and agentic systems. The architect will establish standards and guardrails for reliability, performance, security, privacy, and cost, and guide teams toward shared, reusable platform capabilities. They will also lead architecture governance, build-versus-buy evaluations, technical-risk resolution, and technology decisions informed by total cost of ownership and unit economics.

The architect will mentor principal engineers and emerging architects, clarify ambiguous ideas into executable designs, and build consensus across product, engineering, QA, and DevOps/SRE teams. They will communicate technical trade-offs to executives, customers, and partners. The position is based on-site in Pune, with three to four days per week in the office; only candidates willing to be based in Pune are eligible.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• At least 15 years of professional software engineering experience.
• At least five years in an architect- or principal-level role, such as Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Principal Engineer, or Head of Architecture.
• Experience owning architecture across multiple teams or platform areas and influencing 50 or more engineers.
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native systems, distributed computing, microservices, event-driven architectures, and modern data architectures, including SQL/NoSQL, streaming, and lakehouse.
• Hands-on experience designing production GenAI or agentic systems, including LLM orchestration, RAG, vector databases, evaluation pipelines, and AI observability.
• Strong foundations in data structures and algorithms, object-oriented programming, and modern engineering practices.
• Working fluency in Java, Python, Scala, Go, or Node.js, with a recent history of hands-on design and code reviews.
• Proven ability to establish enterprise-scale governance for quality, performance, resilience, security, and data privacy.
• A track record of quantified impact in areas such as scale, uptime, latency, cost reduction, or delivery speed.
• Willingness to be based in Pune and work from the office three to four days per week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience at a product company, ideally in SaaS.
• Experience with platform consolidation, cloud migration, or monolith-to-platform transformation.
• Experience with ERP, supply chain, or manufacturing software.
• Patents or publications.
• Conference talks or other external technical recognition.

Responsibilities

• Define, communicate, and drive a three-to-five-year technology strategy and architecture roadmap for the platform or a significant product area in partnership with the CTO and product leadership.
• Architect multi-tenant, multi-region platform services with clear service boundaries and establish guardrails for reliability, performance, security, and cost.
• Move teams from product silos toward shared, reusable platform capabilities.
• Lead architecture of the GenAI and agentic platform, including LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector search, evaluation, observability, and model governance, as well as data foundations such as streaming, lakehouse, and analytics.
• Establish and run architecture review forums, design standards, and technical-debt prioritization.
• Identify and resolve systemic technical risks, performance bottlenecks, and cross-team architectural conflicts.
• Lead technology evaluations, proofs of concept, and commercial assessments across cloud, data, AI tooling, and observability, using TCO and unit-economics reasoning.
• Turn emerging ideas into clear designs that teams can execute, balancing customer needs, technical feasibility, and organizational realities.
• Mentor principal engineers and emerging architects and build the architecture leadership bench.
• Partner with Product VPs, QA, DevOps/SRE, and engineering leadership to secure alignment.
• Explain complex technical trade-offs to executives, customers, and partners and drive consensus.

Benefits

• Structured mentorship and training designed for rapid career development.
• Programs intended to support a healthy work-life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business entering a phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative and inclusive culture that supports learning, growth, and diverse perspectives.
• Atmosphere of growth and opportunity where idea-sharing is prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior