Senior Architect - GCI

Mimecast•Minneapolis, MN

About The Position

The Senior Solutions Architect role focuses on the Governance, Compliance, & Insights (GCI) product line at Mimecast. This is a leadership role shaping the future of Mimecast's GCI suite, which helps organizations manage data governance, retention, and compliance at scale. The products include email & collaboration archiving, eDiscovery, compliance management, data retention, audit capabilities, and analytics, alongside new AI-powered governance and compliance tools. The Solutions Architect will act as the connective tissue across product management, user experience, and engineering to translate customer problems into effective solutions. This role is part of an AI-First engineering organization, requiring daily use of AI development tools and designing systems that incorporate AI, LLMs, and agents. The position reports directly to an Enterprise Architect and involves shaping product evolution, integration, and market positioning, rather than deep component design.

Requirements

8+ years building and operating production systems, and engaging with product early in the cycle.
Time as a Solutions Architect, Principal Engineer, Tech Lead, Product Architect, Staff Engineer, or equivalent.
Comfortable owning architecture across multiple teams.
Strong working knowledge of AWS (ECS/EKS, S3, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, IAM, VPC), Kafka, and the ability to reason about distributed systems at high volume.
Track record of designing clean contracts between systems and teams (async messaging, event streaming, REST/gRPC APIs, data contracts).
Comfortable working with PMs on problem definition, customer research synthesis, jobs-to-be-done framing, and outcome hypotheses.
Actively use AI development tools day-to-day and have a real opinion on where they help and where they don’t.
Comfortable designing systems that include LLMs, agents, retrieval, or related components.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Good at building consensus across teams and organizations.
Comfortable with ambiguity.
Driven, accountable, and able to identify the right problems to work on without being told.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
At least 2 years in a Solutions Architect, Principal Engineer, Tech Lead, Product Architect, Staff Engineer, or similar role with significant product-shaping responsibility.
Willingness and drive to use AI development tools in a professional setting.

Nice To Haves

Background in security, compliance, eDiscovery, identity, observability, or data platforms.
Familiarity with agentic AI, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or LLM application architecture.
Experience with eval design for AI systems, product discovery practices, or data contract / data mesh approaches (e.g., ODCS).

Responsibilities

Shape problems with product partners at the problem-framing stage.
Run and facilitate workshops with product managers, engineers, UX designers, and subject matter experts.
Define what “good” looks like in customer and business terms.
Own integration contracts as product artifacts, defining durable interfaces like APIs, events, and data contracts.
Coordinate the work that makes integrations land.
Build the architectural context engineering teams operate inside, including ADRs, data contracts, and service interaction patterns.
Set NFR and evaluability targets for performance, availability, security, cost, eval coverage, agent boundary safety, and prompt/data-contract stability.
Coordinate across teams and organizations to gather stakeholder buy-in and shepherd decisions.
Engage Enterprise Architecture bidirectionally, bringing cross-product and platform-level decisions for alignment and pulling EA-level constraints into product shaping.
Estimate and monitor cost and unit economics, providing cost projections and flagging unexpected spend.
Reason about cost per outcome.
Drop into detailed technical design when the problem warrants it or to unblock a team.
Propose technical debt work and prioritize debt reduction with Product Management partners.