Head of Architecture, Digital Assets

Fidelity • Durham, NC

4d • Onsite

About The Position

As Head of Architecture for Fidelity Digital Assets, you will define and lead the architectural vision across custody, trading, and wallet platforms. Reporting to the Fidelity Digital Assets CTO, this role combines deep technical expertise with strategic leadership and cross-functional collaboration. You will lead a high-performing team of architects and partner closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to align architectural direction with product strategy and deliver a resilient, secure, and scalable digital assets platform. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for a focused, high-impact architecture organization. In addition to setting standards and guiding key design decisions, you will operate as a true player-coach, diving into complex technical challenges, unblocking critical paths, and helping resolve the toughest architectural and system design issues when needed. Given the mission-critical nature of a 24x7 digital assets platform, you will bring a strong sense of ownership for resiliency, availability, and customer impact, stepping in during critical production issues when your technical leadership can help restore service or reduce risk. Success in this role requires strong technical credibility, sound judgment, and the ability to influence engineering leaders and teams through partnership, clarity, and trust, particularly where architecture must drive alignment without direct reporting authority. You will mentor and develop a team of highly skilled architects while fostering a culture of engineering excellence, technical rigor, and pragmatic innovation that attracts, retains, and grows top technical talent.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field
• 15 plus years of software development experience, including significant architecture and leadership responsibility
• Proven track record defining and delivering secure, resilient, scalable production software platforms at significant user and transaction scale
• Deep software architecture expertise across distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, APIs, data, security, reliability, and operational excellence
• Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, mentor, and retain top technical talent
• Deep technical familiarity and production experience with at least one public blockchain protocol
• Strong understanding of cryptocurrencies, public blockchain protocols, and the evolving digital assets ecosystem, with a demonstrated ability to stay current through protocol research, developer communities, social channels, and broader industry discourse
• Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-region systems with strong resiliency and operational continuity in mission-critical 24x7 environments
• Understanding of architectures supporting low-latency trading systems
• Strong ownership mindset and experience providing technical leadership during critical production events or high-severity incidents
• Ability to influence engineering leaders and teams through technical credibility, sound judgment, clear communication, and partnership
• Experience collaborating with senior leadership, product, engineering, operations, risk, compliance, and other cross-functional stakeholders
• Strong analytical, communication, organizational, and decision-making skills

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the architectural vision across custody, trading, and wallet platforms.
• Lead a high-performing team of architects.
• Partner closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to align architectural direction with product strategy.
• Deliver a resilient, secure, and scalable digital assets platform.
• Set standards and guide key design decisions.
• Dive into complex technical challenges, unblock critical paths, and help resolve architectural and system design issues.
• Step in during critical production issues when technical leadership can help restore service or reduce risk.
• Mentor and develop a team of highly skilled architects.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, technical rigor, and pragmatic innovation.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health care coverage
• Emotional well-being support
• Market-leading retirement
• Generous paid time off
• Parental leave
• Charitable giving employee match program
• Educational assistance including student loan repayment, tuition reimbursement, and learning resources

What This Job Offers

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