The RoleAs Chief Architect you set and steward the architectural direction of Showpad's entire product portfolio. You are the CTO's principal technical partner: the person who defines the target-state architecture, sequences the runway to get there, holds the bar on technical quality, and makes the economics of AI and cloud a first-class design consideration rather than an after-the-fact surprise.
The role is deeply technical and deeply cross-functional. You will spend your time in design reviews and equally in rooms with Product, GTM, customers, the executive leadership team and the board - and you will be expected to be credible and additive in all of them.
Key Responsibilities- Portfolio architecture. Own and lead the overall architectural direction across multiple products, defining the target-state platform architecture and the pragmatic path from where each product is today.
- Architecture Review Board. Chair and run the ARB - establishing standards, reference architectures, decision records and review cadence, and making it a forum engineers actively bring work to rather than a gate they route around.
- Architecture and design runways. Embed directly in the development process where complex deliverables require an architecture or design runway ahead of execution, and stay engaged through delivery rather than handing off a document.
- Customer engagement. Represent Showpad's technology to customers and prospects - architecture, security and AI deep dives, plus the product and commercial context that makes them land with an economic buyer.
- Technology transformation. Lead modernization of complex, dated products in the portfolio: assess, sequence, de-risk and drive multi-year transformation without stalling the roadmap.
- Staffing and operating models. Recommend staffing and sourcing models to the CTO that are efficient on both cost and execution - including global team topology, build/buy decisions and skill mix.
- AI and cloud economics. Establish the practices, guardrails and observability that keep AI inference, AI-assisted development and cloud operating costs predictable and defensible as we scale.
- Role model. Set the standard for business-aware technical excellence - engineering judgment that is rigorous about quality and equally rigorous about cost, time-to-value and customer outcome.
QualificationsExperience- 15+ years of industry experience, with substantial depth in B2B SaaS.
- Has led architecture and development for large-scale enterprise products - multi-tenant, security- and compliance-sensitive, with demanding enterprise customers.
- Deep, demonstrable expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native SaaS architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Proven track record working with and through globally distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.
- Experience establishing architecture practices across multi-team engineering orgs (RFCs, ADRs, design reviews).
- Has owned and delivered significant technical transformation or modernization inside a matrix organization, with influence rather than direct authority over much of the surface area.
- Management experience leading teams of 10-25 people directly, while remaining hands-on and technically current.
Technical Depth- Modern AI architecture. Demonstrated depth designing AI-centric systems that actually shipped in product - not prototypes, pilots or strategy decks.
- Generative AI. Deeply conversant and hands-on across the modern GenAI stack: foundation models and model selection, RAG and retrieval architecture, embeddings and vector stores, agentic patterns and tool use, orchestration frameworks, fine-tuning and adaptation, evaluation and guardrails, and latency/quality/cost trade-offs.
- Cloud architecture. Expert-level cloud architecture and operations, including infrastructure as code, modern CI/CD and deployment pipelines, containers and orchestration, observability, resilience and multi-region design.
- Cost management. Real expertise in the cost side of modern engineering - AI inference and token economics, the cost of AI-assisted development, and cloud operational spend - with a track record of moving unit economics in the right direction.
Nice to Have- Experience in B2B SaaS, multi-tenant platforms, or sales enablement / GTM tech.
- Background in platform/developer-experience engineering.
- Open-source contributions or public technical writing that demonstrates architectural thinking.
- Familiarity with security-by-design, SOC 2, and compliance-aware architecture.
What We're Looking For - Personal Qualities- Works seamlessly across Product, Technology and GTM without formal authority, building the trust that makes influence possible.
- Constructively collaborative but firm - anchored in a fact-based belief system, willing to hold a position on the evidence and equally willing to change it on better evidence.
- Senior-level gravitas and presence, with the judgment and polish to present to the executive leadership team and the board.
- Able to express complex technical concepts in a genuinely consumable way, calibrated to the audience - board member, customer executive, product manager or engineer.
- Comfortable partnering with a deeply technical CEO and going as far down into the technology underpinnings as the conversation requires.
Why This Role MattersTwo strong companies have become one platform opportunity. The decisions this role makes over the next 24 months - on AI architecture, on modernization sequencing, on how we build and what it costs to run - will shape Showpad's product for the next decade. It is an unusually direct line between architectural craft and company outcome.
