Sr. Architect, Network Access - Austin, TX

Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information across enterprises, governments, and consumers.

Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend harnesses AI to protect organizations and individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.

The Trend Vision One™ enterprise cybersecurity platform accelerates proactive security outcomes by predicting and preventing threats across the entire digital estate and environments like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Proactive security starts here.  TrendMicro.com

Location: Based out of our Austin, TX office and requires in-office presence three days a week.

Position Summary:
We are seeking a Senior Technical Architect to own and evolve the architecture of Trend Micro’s distributed secure network access platform. In this role, you will define the architectural vision for a hybrid system spanning customer-deployed components and cloud-hosted (SaaS) services, ensuring scalability, reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability. You will guide system-wide design decisions, establish clear architectural guardrails, and enable multiple engineering teams to deliver independently and efficiently. This is a highly collaborative role requiring deep distributed systems and networking expertise, strong technical judgment, and the ability to translate complex tradeoffs into clear direction across engineering, product, and security stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the end-to-end architecture of a distributed network access platform spanning on-prem agents and connectors, and cloud-hosted relay and management (SaaS) components.

• Define architectural direction and guardrails to ensure scalability, high availability, regional failover, performance, and long-term evolvability.

• Design architectures that enable a small number of semi-autonomous teams to deliver independently, without excessive coordination overhead.

• Make and guide system-wide architectural decisions, including protocol selection (e.g., transport, multiplexing, RPC), based on performance, reliability, and maintainability tradeoffs.

• Establish strategies for backward compatibility, upgrades, and incremental system evolution.

• Produce and maintain architecture artifacts such as design documents, diagrams, tradeoff analyses, and reference implementations.

• Review and approve designs across multiple development teams, providing clear, actionable feedback.

• Mentor and coach engineers on distributed systems design, architectural tradeoffs, and pragmatic decision-making.

• Collaborate with product management, customers, field engineering, and security researchers to shape designs and propose integration approaches for secure access to internal and internet-facing resources.

• Occasionally implement prototypes or targeted production code to validate designs or unblock teams.

Required Qualifications:

• Significant experience designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems with ownership of architectural decisions.

• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals and L4/L7 behavior, including protocol tradeoffs relevant to hybrid on-prem and cloud systems.

• Experience selecting and applying existing protocols and technologies in production environments.

• Proven ability to reason about scalability, latency, performance budgets, consistency, and failure modes.

• Experience designing architectures that enable multiple semi-autonomous teams to deliver independently.

• Experience designing and operating cloud-hosted, as-a-service platforms, alongside on-prem components deployed in customer environments.

• Familiarity with cloud environments, operating primarily in Azure with supporting components in other providers.

• Familiarity with AI tools across the software development lifecycle, and the ability to collaborate effectively alongside such tools to enhance productivity and innovation.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining designs and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Hands-on software development experience, with the ability to