Principal Architect

Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform that empowers dealmakers in relationship-driven industries to find, manage, and grow better deals. With industry-leading automated relationship intelligence insights and technology, Affinity enables leaders to drive deals, free dealmakers from manual data entry, and ensure their teams can take action with confidence, knowing the context and history of every relationship. 

As a Principal Architect, you will shape the technical landscape of Affinity's platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and innovation. You will operate across the entire engineering organization, driving the architectural vision and aligning it with our business objectives. The results of your work will show in the quality of the product we deliver and the delight of our customers. It will also show in the internal developer experience as we are able to tackle greater challenges with ease.

Reporting to the CTO, you will be a member of the Engineering Executive team. You will be a key influencer and collaborator, working with engineering directors, engineers, product management, and design to drive our architectural strategy and technical roadmap. Your focus will be on defining and maintaining a clear architectural vision, leading critical decisions, and ensuring alignment with our long-term strategy. You will lead initiatives to address technical debt, enhance scalability and stability, and introduce new technologies. The breadth of this role won’t allow you to be writing code all the time, but we estimate that 25% of your time will be hands-on-keyboard.

Key Responsibilities:

• Deep understanding of our product, customers, and forward-looking opportunities.
• Define and lead the architectural strategy, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate across teams to align on priorities and execute shared goals.
• Develop and maintain forward-looking technical roadmaps focused on addressing technical debt, scalability, and sustainability.
• Lead initiatives and projects in collaboration with cross-functional partners.
• Innovate and integrate new technologies to drive platform evolution.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and share expertise in architectural best practices.
• Oversee documentation quality, technical reviews, and architectural consistency.
• Contribute to code and review, setting the standard for code quality.

Qualifications:

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• Experience: 12+ years in software engineering with a strong background in system architecture and design. 3+ years leading architectural decisions across a large organization or product suite.
• Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), and data processing. Expertise in one or more programming languages such as Ruby (preferred) or Python. Affection for monoliths is a plus.
• Leadership: Proven track record of mentoring engineers, with the ability to influence without direct authority. Experience guiding teams through significant technical and architectural changes. You strive to make everyone around you better.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills with a methodical approach to solving complex technical problems. Your tradeoff decisions are grounded in reality vs theory.
• Cross-team collaboration: demonstrated success working across engineering, product management, and design.

Tech Stack:

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. We’re leaning into event-driven architecture using Kafka. Our infrastructure is hosted by AWS and runs on Kubernetes. We use Python, Spark, and SQL for data engineering, with Databricks for compute and orchestration and Delta Lake for storage. We also utilize LLMs for data normalization and specialized tasks.

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate, as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver value to our customers.
• We