Product Area Lead Architect (EU, UK, US)

Accelerant

38d•Remote

About The Position

Accelerant is seeking a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands on, operational architectural leadership for our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area. This role operates at a Principal level, influencing architecture and execution across multiple autonomous product teams. You will work closely with team architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to ensure teams move fast without fragmenting the architecture. This is not an ivory tower architecture role. It is highly collaborative, pragmatic, and operational, focused on identifying architectural gaps, managing dependencies, and enabling teams to execute confidently within a shared architectural framework. You will champion standards based architecture, leveraging web standards, open protocols, and industry conventions to build interoperable, accessible, and future proof systems.

Requirements

Full Stack SaaS Architecture:
Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js
Deep knowledge of web platform fundamentals and browser native capabilities
Experience designing and evolving well structured APIs for platform integrations
Architectural & Systems Thinking:
Deep knowledge of architecture principles, design patterns, and distributed systems
Proven ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs in complex, evolving systems
Experience in cloud native environments, preferably AWS
AI Enabled Engineering:
Demonstrated experience using AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.)
Understanding of AI applications for development productivity and code quality improvement
8 to 12+ years in software engineering and architecture roles
Proven experience operating across multiple agile teams in an architectural leadership capacity
Track record of managing cross team dependencies and bridging architectural vision with day to day execution
Proven ability to drive AI adoption and transformation within engineering organizations
Excellent communication and facilitation skills with ability to align work across distributed teams
Pragmatic, operational mindset with strong problem solving abilities
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Responsibilities

Ensure architectural alignment across product teams, partnering closely with team architects and engineering managers
Proactively identify architectural gaps, technical debt, and quality risks; drive resolution through collaboration and influence
Manage cross team technical dependencies to enable independent, parallel execution
Translate architectural strategy into clear, actionable guidance that teams can apply sprint by sprint
Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical conflicts across teams through principled, pragmatic decision making
Act as an escalation point for complex cross team technical challenges
Ensure architectural decisions are clearly communicated, understood, and consistently applied
Define and maintain architectural patterns across backend services, APIs, data platforms, and front end systems
Design scalable, resilient systems for analytics, workflow orchestration, and intelligence features
Guide decomposition of legacy systems into well defined services and domains
Evaluate technologies and data stores, favoring open standards and long term maintainability
Architect distributed systems with focus on reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability
Establish API design standards ensuring consistency, discoverability, and ease of integration
Define front end standards prioritizing web platform capabilities, progressive enhancement, and accessibility (WCAG)
Create governance frameworks that balance standardization with team autonomy
Drive adoption of industry standards (OAuth2, OpenID Connect, OpenTelemetry, JSON:API) over proprietary alternatives
Partner with engineering teams on design reviews, PR reviews, and implementation guidance
Establish standards for cross cutting concerns: API versioning, auth, observability, error handling, and resiliency patterns
Collaborate with platform and DevOps teams on containerization, CI/CD, and cloud native deployment
Produce clear technical design documentation that drives alignment and knowledge sharing
Mentor engineers and raise the overall architectural maturity of the organization
Architect customer facing GenAI features using LLMs, including RAG pipelines, prompt engineering frameworks, and conversational AI interfaces
Define patterns for ML model integration: serving endpoints, API contracts, versioning, and health monitoring
Partner with Data Science to translate models into production grade features with clear integration contracts and deployment workflows
Establish standards for responsible AI, including evaluation criteria, privacy guardrails, and LLM output validation
Scale AI driven development workflows across teams, ensuring engineers leverage AI coding tools effectively
Guide team architects and coach senior engineers on using AI tools to enhance productivity and code quality
Work hands on with teams to identify opportunities for AI to solve operational challenges and improve velocity
Evaluate and recommend technologies to enhance capabilities across analytics, workflow, and intelligence domains
Ensure architectural integrity through code reviews, assessments, and continuous monitoring
Proactively identify technical risks and devise strategies for reliability, security, and performance