Head Of Software Architecture

Power Factors•Boston, MA

17h

About The Position

Power Factors is a leading provider of renewable energy management software (REMS) with a significant global presence. As the company scales in complexity and embraces AI-native capabilities, there is a need for a unified technical vision and architectural strategy. The Head of Software Architecture role is designed to address this need by defining and enforcing enterprise architecture standards, leading architectural reviews, and personally architecting solutions for complex challenges, particularly in AI-based product introductions, IoT data acquisition, and SaaS scalability. This is a hands-on leadership position that combines strategic thinking with deep technical expertise and the ability to write code and review pull requests. The role acts as a crucial link between the company's strategic goals and the technical execution by engineering teams.

Requirements

15–20 years of progressive experience in software engineering, with significant time spent in architecture and technical leadership roles.
Demonstrated experience architecting large-scale, high-complexity systems with significant operational stakes.
Proven ability to lead and mentor senior engineers and architects across distributed teams.
Experience building high-throughput, high-integrity trading or transactional systems where correctness and performance are non-negotiable.
Track record architecting and shipping end-to-end AI-based product introductions, from concept to production launch.
An architect who still codes — genuinely enjoys building, not just designing.
Experience with systems that ingest and process high-volume telemetry from distributed physical assets.
Familiarity with edge computing architectures and industrial control systems.
Solid working knowledge of machine learning and data science sufficient to make informed architectural and platform decisions.
Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol, development LLMs, and building LLM-based product features.
Deep experience with GCP and/or AWS at an architectural level.
Experience selecting and rolling out AI dev tools that meaningfully increase engineering team productivity.
Advanced experience designing and scaling multi-tenant SaaS applications.
Working knowledge of mobile architecture and delivery, sufficient to guide teams building mobile experiences.
Strong systems thinking with the ability to zoom between enterprise strategy and line-level code.
Executive-level communication — able to translate architectural tradeoffs into business terms for the CPTO and executive team.
Comfortable operating with significant technical authority while remaining collaborative and low-ego.
Genuine enthusiasm for staying current with the fast-moving AI and LLM landscape.
Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, VP of Engineering, or Chief Architect background.
Experience operating in a scaling, multi-product SaaS organization.
Comfortable being both the enterprise architecture authority and an individual contributor when the problem demands it.

Nice To Haves

Ideally direct experience in renewable energy or broader energy sector software (strongly preferred, not required).

Responsibilities

Define and maintain Power Factors' enterprise architecture standards, reference architectures, and technical guardrails across all verticals.
Lead architectural reviews for major initiatives, ensuring consistency, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
Own the technical roadmap for cross-cutting platform capabilities (data platform, integration layer, identity, observability).
Design for complex, high-availability systems where correctness, latency, and data integrity carry real operational and commercial consequences.
Partner with vertical leaders (SCADA, EMS, APM, Platform, CloudOps) to ensure local architecture decisions align with enterprise direction.
Build and lead a distributed architecture function that operates as a trusted technical authority across Greece, Montreal, and other regions.
Mentor senior engineers and engineering leaders on architectural judgment, system design, and technical tradeoff analysis.
Establish and run architecture governance forums (design reviews, RFC processes, technical steering committees).
Act as a technical escalation point for the highest-stakes design decisions across the organization.
Architect and personally help build end-to-end AI-based product capabilities — from data acquisition and model selection through deployment and monitoring.
Define Power Factors' architectural approach to LLM-based products, including use of Model Context Protocol (MCP), retrieval architectures, and agentic workflows.
Evaluate and select development LLMs and AI platforms appropriate for embedding into commercial products.
Own the technical bridge between REMI and other AI-native initiatives and the broader platform architecture.
Bring machine learning and data science expertise to bear on product decisions — model selection, feature engineering, data pipeline design, and MLOps practices.
Write production code, prototype new architectural patterns, and directly contribute to the hardest technical problems facing the organization.
Lead by example on code quality, testing discipline, and engineering craftsmanship.
Stay close enough to the codebase to make credible, current architectural judgments rather than relying on secondhand reporting.
Build proof-of-concept implementations to de-risk major architectural bets before full team investment.
Architect scalable IoT data acquisition systems capable of ingesting, normalizing, and processing high-volume telemetry from distributed renewable energy assets.
Design architecture for edge devices and Power Plant Controllers (PPC), balancing on-site computation, latency constraints, and cloud connectivity.
Ensure architectural approaches account for grid code compliance, real-time control requirements, and the operational realities of SCADA and EMS environments.
Apply renewables and energy industry domain knowledge to inform data model, integration, and control system design decisions.
Own cloud architecture strategy across GCP and/or AWS, including cost, resilience, and security posture.
Advance Power Factors' multi-tenant SaaS architecture to support scale, tenant isolation, and configurability without fragmenting the codebase.
Define architectural standards for mobile app development where products extend to field and operations use cases.
Evaluate build-vs-buy and platform consolidation decisions across the technology stack.
Identify, evaluate, and roll out AI development tools that enable a 3–4x productivity improvement across engineering teams.
Define best practices for AI-assisted coding, testing, and code review, balancing speed with quality and security.
Partner with engineering leadership to measure and report on productivity gains from AI tooling adoption.