Senior Enterprise Architect

Goosehead Insurance•Westlake, OH

About The Position

We are seeking a visionary, hands-on Senior Enterprise Architect to help shape the future of the organization’s software platforms. The role provides technical leadership across software architecture, enterprise modernization, scalability, cloud adoption, and the strategic integration of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The architect works across architecture, engineering, product, data, security, and business teams to establish technical direction, define architectural standards, and translate complex business challenges into practical, scalable, and secure software solutions. This is a software architecture role, not a data science or AI model-development role. The successful candidate will understand how to apply and integrate AI capabilities into enterprise software; deep expertise in statistics, model training, or academic machine learning is not required. The role remains hands-on while operating at an enterprise level, developing prototypes, reference implementations, frameworks, scaffolding, and complex technical solutions that help engineering teams adopt architectural patterns and deliver high-quality software. It also serves as a technical thought-leadership and mentorship role, promoting engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous modernization. Experience in the insurance industry is a strong plus.

Requirements

12 or more years of professional experience in software engineering, software architecture, or a related technical discipline.
4 or more years operating at a Principal Engineer, Principal Architect, Enterprise Architect, Lead Architect, or similar senior technical leadership level within a complex enterprise environment.
Deep, hands-on experience designing and building enterprise-scale software applications and distributed systems.
Strong software development background with significant experience in one or more modern programming languages such as Java, Python, .NET/C#, or similar.
Demonstrated expertise in modern architectural patterns, including microservices, event-driven architecture, API-driven systems, distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and domain-driven design.
Experience architecting and delivering systems requiring high availability, scalability, resiliency, security, performance, and operational excellence.
Experience with cloud platforms and cloud-native services; Microsoft Azure is preferred.
Ability to move between high-level architecture and hands-on technical implementation, including developing prototypes, reference architectures, frameworks, or production-quality code.
Strong understanding of software development lifecycle practices, DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and modern engineering practices.
Practical experience with AI and/or generative AI in software applications or engineering environments.
Ability to evaluate AI technologies and determine how to integrate them effectively into enterprise software and existing technology ecosystems.
Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence engineers, architects, product leaders, business stakeholders, and executive leadership.
Ability to establish technical direction, build consensus, and make sound architectural decisions in a complex enterprise environment.
Ability to operate at multiple levels, from discussing enterprise technology strategy with executives to reviewing architecture and code with engineers.

Nice To Haves

Experience in the insurance industry.
Experience with Microsoft Azure cloud platforms and cloud-native services.

Responsibilities

Design and collaborate with engineering teams to build resilient, scalable, secure, maintainable, and observable distributed software systems.
Develop architectural prototypes, reference implementations, scaffolding, frameworks, algorithms, and other technical solutions that demonstrate architectural patterns and accelerate engineering adoption and delivery.
Lead architectural direction for software modernization initiatives, including legacy application transformation, application decomposition, cloud adoption, platform evolution, API strategies, integration, and modernization of critical enterprise systems.
Define and lead the technical strategy for incorporating AI and generative AI capabilities into enterprise applications and platforms.
Evaluate and integrate LLMs, third-party AI services, AI agents, and other emerging AI technologies where they provide meaningful business or engineering value.
Identify opportunities to use AI to improve developer productivity, software development, testing, code quality, documentation, application modernization, and other areas of the SDLC.
Establish reusable patterns, standards, and guardrails that enable engineering teams to adopt AI safely and effectively.
Establish architecture patterns, reference architectures, frameworks, engineering standards, and technical roadmaps across software development and AI adoption, aligned with enterprise strategy, business objectives, security requirements, and industry best practices.
Provide architectural leadership for cloud-native applications and distributed systems, emphasizing scalability, resilience, availability, performance, observability, and operational excellence.
Partner with product management, engineering, data, security, infrastructure, and business leadership to translate complex business problems into practical, elegant, scalable technical solutions.
Mentor architects and engineering teams and promote strong software engineering practices, rigorous code quality, design excellence, performance optimization, and continuous improvement.
Evaluate emerging technologies, software frameworks, cloud-native services, AI capabilities, and architectural approaches to evolve the organization’s technology landscape.
Help teams turn architectural vision into working software, balancing enterprise-level direction with detailed technical implementation.