Product Area Lead Architect (EU, UK, US)

About Accelerant

Accelerant is a data-driven risk exchange connecting underwriters of specialty insurance risk with risk capital providers. Accelerant was founded in 2018 by a group of longtime insurance industry executives and technology experts who shared a vision of rebuilding the way risk is exchanged – so that it works better, for everyone. The Accelerant risk exchange does business across more than 20 different countries and 250 specialty products, and we are proud that our insurers have been awarded an AM Best A- (Excellent) rating. For more information, please visit www.accelerant.ai.

Location: Remote 

Department: Product & Technology 

Reports to: Director of Engineering 

Product Area: Insights, Analytics & Workflows 

Job Description 

Accelerant is seeking a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands on, operational architectural leadership for our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area. This role operates at a Principal level, influencing architecture and execution across multiple autonomous product teams. You will work closely with team architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to ensure teams move fast without fragmenting the architecture. 

This is not an ivory tower architecture role. It is highly collaborative, pragmatic, and operational, focused on identifying architectural gaps, managing dependencies, and enabling teams to execute confidently within a shared architectural framework. You will champion standards based architecture, leveraging web standards, open protocols, and industry conventions to build interoperable, accessible, and future proof systems. 

Key Responsibilities 

Operational Architectural Leadership 

• Ensure architectural alignment across product teams, partnering closely with team architects and engineering managers 

• Proactively identify architectural gaps, technical debt, and quality risks; drive resolution through collaboration and influence 

• Manage cross team technical dependencies to enable independent, parallel execution 

• Translate architectural strategy into clear, actionable guidance that teams can apply sprint by sprint 

Cross Team Coordination & Alignment 

• Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical conflicts across teams through principled, pragmatic decision making 

• Act as an escalation point for complex cross team technical challenges 

• Ensure architectural decisions are clearly communicated, understood, and consistently applied 

Design and Innovation 

• Define and maintain architectural patterns across backend services, APIs, data platforms, and front end systems 

• Design scalable, resilient systems for analytics, workflow orchestration, and intelligence features 

• Guide decomposition of legacy systems into well defined services and domains 

• Evaluate technologies and data stores, favoring open standards and long term maintainability 

• Architect distributed systems with focus on reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability 

Standards & Governance 

• Establish API design standards ensuring consistency, discoverability, and ease of integration 

• Define front end standards prioritizing web platform capabilities, progressive enhancement, and accessibility (WCAG) 

• Create governance frameworks that balance standardization with team autonomy