Director, Platform Architecture

Overview

The Director of Platform Architecture is a visionary technical leader responsible for defining, governing, and continuously evolving the architectural foundation that powers our products, platforms, and Engineering organization. This leader owns the technical blueprint of how our systems are designed, how services communicate, how data flows, and how AI capabilities are embedded across the platform — ensuring that every architectural decision made today accelerates our ability to innovate, scale, and compete tomorrow. 

 

The Director of Platform Architecture works in close partnership with Engineering Managers, Product teams, and Senior Engineers to make architecture real — translating vision into patterns, guardrails, and working systems that Engineering teams can build on with confidence.  

 

Starting base pay for this role is between $175,000 and $222,000. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as transferable skills, work experience, business needs, training, location, and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role will be eligible for a bonus as well as competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits, wellness reimbursement, life insurance, and a 401(k) with company match. We offer vacation and sick leave benefits (under a flexible time off policy in most states).

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture Strategy & Vision 

• Defines and owns the enterprise platform architecture strategy — establishing the technical vision for how our systems, services, APIs, and data layers are designed to support product innovation, client scale, and competitive differentiation. 

• Develops and maintains architecture principles, patterns, and guardrails that guide Engineering teams toward consistent, scalable, and maintainable system design across back-end, API, and integration layers. 

• Leads architectural runway planning in partnership with the VP of Engineering and Product leadership — ensuring architectural investments stay ahead of product demand and organizational growth. 

• Evaluates and makes deliberate decisions on foundational technology choices — including frameworks, cloud services, messaging patterns, data stores, and AI/ML integration approaches — balancing innovation with operational sustainability. 

• Owns the architecture decision record (ADR) process, ensuring significant architectural decisions are documented, peer-reviewed, and accessible to the broader engineering organization. 

AI-First Platform Design 

• Champions an AI-first design philosophy across the platform — ensuring that AI capabilities, including LLM integration, intelligent workflow orchestration, and ML-powered services, are treated as first-class architectural concerns rather than afterthoughts. 

• Defines architectural patterns for AI capability integration, including API design standards for LLM-powered services, prompt management patterns, model versioning strategies, and AI observability requirements. 

• Partners with the AI Platform & Backend Services Engineering team to ensure AI capabilities are exposed through well-governed, composable APIs that Product AI Engineers can consume with confidence. 

• Establishes architectural standards for responsible AI integration — including data privacy boundaries, model input/output validation, fallback behaviors, and latency expectations for AI-powered service calls. 

• Stays at the forefront of AI platform engineering practices, evaluating emerging patterns and tools and translating them into actionable architectural guidance for the Engineering organization. 

Back-End & API Architecture Governance 

• Owns back-end and API architecture standards across the Engineering organization — governing service decomposition, API contract design, versioning policies, inter-service communication patterns, and data ownership boundaries. 

• Provides architectural oversight to the Manager of Back-End Software Engineering and Manager of Technical Software Engineering — ensuring that engineering work executed within those teams is architecturally sound, consistently patterned, and aligned with the platform roadmap. 

• Leads architecture reviews for significant new systems, features, and integrations — providing structured, actionable feedback that elevates design quality without becoming a bottleneck to delivery. 

• Partners with the API Access Control Manager to ensure that API security architecture, authentication and authorization patterns, and access governance are embedded into the platform architecture model rather than bolted on after the fact. 

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