Technical Platform Architect

Ashley Furniture•Tampa, FL

11d•Onsite

About The Position

We are building an internal platform that serves every engineering team at Ashley, encompassing thousands of repositories, dozens of Kubernetes clusters, and delivery teams spread across multiple business domains. We are looking for a Technical Platform Architect to set the technical direction for that platform. This is a hands-on architecture role where you will write code, review pull requests, and prototype the patterns you propose. Your influence will stem from making the recommended path measurably easier than alternatives, from evidence, and from your ability to earn the trust of engineers who are free to ignore you. The ideal candidate has experience driving technical change in a large organization by building something people chose to adopt. We value how you hold your knowledge as much as what you know, expecting you to bring your experience as hypotheses to be tested against Ashley's unique constraints, teams, and history. The ability to adapt and change your mind based on evidence is crucial.

Requirements

A bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years designing and operating platform or infrastructure systems at enterprise scale.
Demonstrated ability to drive technical change across organizational boundaries without formal authority.
A habit of holding your own experience loosely; able to describe a pattern brought into a new organization, tested, and set aside if it didn't fit.
Evidence-based technology selection; able to walk through a decision where you chose against your own preference and explain what moved you.
Deep, practical experience with Kubernetes and container-based delivery, including understanding of failure modes at scale.
Fluency in infrastructure as code and declarative, continuously reconciled infrastructure; able to explain the difference between reconciliation loops and run-to-completion provisioning and when it matters.
Strong experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, with a clear point of view on branching, artifact promotion, and release strategy.
Practical experience with OpenTelemetry and a clear view of instrumentation as a platform concern (semantic conventions, collector architecture, auto-instrumentation, cardinality/cost tradeoffs).
Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language (C# preferred) and at least one shell or scripting language (PowerShell preferred).
Substantial experience with a major cloud provider (Azure preferred).
The ability to design for non-functional requirements (availability, reliability, scalability, security, operability) and explain tradeoffs to engineers and executives.
Excellent written communication skills for asynchronous influence through documentation, design records, and code review.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating an internal developer portal.
Familiarity with platform engineering and Team Topologies concepts, particularly platform-as-product and cognitive load as a design constraint.
Experience with GitOps tooling and policy-as-code enforcement.
Background in developer experience or developer productivity work.
Experience in a large, multi-team, multi-org source control environment.
Experience introducing security and compliance controls into delivery pipelines in a way engineers accept rather than route around.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and own the architecture of Ashley's internal developer platform, including golden paths, reference implementations, and self-service capabilities.
Define and evolve enterprise standards for source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, observability, and deployment.
Evaluate emerging technologies against real constraints and make clear recommendations, including recommendations not to adopt.
Establish architectural guardrails that allow teams to move quickly without creating systems the organization cannot operate.
Design and implement reusable platform components to eliminate repeated effort across teams.
Prototype and prove out new patterns before recommending them broadly.
Contribute directly to platform codebases, automation, and tooling.
Make observability a property of the platform through standardized OpenTelemetry instrumentation, consistent semantic conventions, and replaceable collector topologies.
Ensure new and existing systems are resilient and operable by the teams that own them.
Partner with delivery teams to understand their friction points and design capabilities to remove them.
Publish patterns, standards, and reference material for teams to act upon.
Mentor engineers across the organization and raise platform fluency company-wide.
Drive migration and modernization efforts through evidence and enablement, not mandate.
Treat the platform as a product, understanding user needs, goals, and failures.
Measure adoption and developer experience to inform prioritization.
Make deliberate tradeoffs between capability, cognitive load, and operational burden.