Enterprise Software Architect

Company Description

Trupanion is a leading provider of medical insurance for cats and dogs in North America. Our mission is to help loving, responsible pet owners budget and care for their pets. At Trupanion, we offer a collaborative, casual, and pet-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to be themselves.

Job Description

The Enterprise Software Architect is accountable for defining, evolving, and communicating the enterprise’s target-state architecture and technology strategy. This role ensures that software systems, data, platforms, and integration patterns are designed to scale, remain secure, and enable long-term business agility. The Enterprise Architect connects business strategy to technical execution, balancing near-term delivery with long-term architectural health.

This role operates at the intersection of strategy, execution, and influence. Success requires deep technical credibility, strong business acumen, and the ability to guide senior technical leaders and executives toward sound, pragmatic technology decisions. This architecture role is a hands-on and strategic leadership position, accountable for defining the enterprise future state, ensuring positive business outcomes enabled by that future state, and holding accountability for ensuring implementation aligns with target-state architecture. In doing so, the Enterprise Software Architect demonstrates a clear preference to buy and integrate commercially available or partner-provided solutions over building bespoke systems, making build decisions intentionally and only where they create differentiated business value.

This position is open across the United States with a preference for those in Seattle or the East Coast time zone. Seattle candidates will have a hybrid remote/in-office schedule where you will work from our casual, pet-friendly office at least 3 days a week. 

Key Outcomes & Impact

The Enterprise Software Architect will:

• Establish and maintain a cohesive enterprise architecture vision aligned with business objectives
• Reduce complexity and technical debt through intentional simplification and modernization
• Enable faster, safer delivery by providing clear standards, patterns, and guardrails
• Improve technology investment decisions through roadmaps, governance, and metrics
• Elevate architectural maturity across teams via mentorship, influence, and example

Responsibilities

Enterprise Architecture Strategy

• Define and continuously evolve enterprise target-state architectures across application, data, integration, infrastructure, and security domains
• Develop and maintain multi-year architecture roadmaps that balance innovation, cost, risk, and delivery velocity
• Translate business strategy into actionable architectural direction for product and platform teams
• Ensure architectural decisions prioritize simplicity, scalability, resilience, and security
• Leads the selection of new application, data, and infrastructure technologies and validates that selection aligns to target architecture and overall technology direction

Architecture Governance & Standards

• Establish, own, and evolve enterprise architecture standards, principles, patterns, and reference architectures
• Lead architecture reviews to ensure alignment with target-state direction while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy
• Partner with engineering leadership to ensure governance is enabling rather than blocking delivery
• Promote consistent adoption of standards while allowing for pragmatic, data-driven exceptions
• Document and evangelize utilization of AI technologies such as Codex, Claude, or other AI to to support Architectural practices
• Ensure usage of AI in support of architectural deliverables meets governance and compliance considerations

Solution Alignment & Delivery Enablement

• Collaborate closely with Solution Architects, Principal Engineers, and Engineering Teams to align designs with enterprise strategy
• Provide architectural guidance during initiative inception, major design decisions, and complex trade-off discussions
• Support teams in designing cloud-native, event-driven, and API-first solutions where appropriate
• Ensure architectural decisions consider operational excellence, observability, and supportability

Modernization & Technical Debt Reduction

• Assess legacy systems and define clear modernization and migration strategies
• Identify and prioritize opportunities to reduce architectural risk, duplication, and long-term cost
• Guide incremental modernization efforts that minimize disruption while advancing target-state goals