Senior Staff Platform Architect: Cross-Domain Scaling

Aiven; Helsinki; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity plan

Hybrid work policy

Equipment provided

PD Budget for learning

Wellbeing program

Global time off commitment

Country-specific benefits

Job summary

Aiven is building a dedicated Architecture function and seeks a senior individual-contributor who can set direction and personally tackle the hardest engineering work to prove it out. This role anchors the future of our platform, guiding cross-domain decisions and long-horizon evolution across services.

You will maintain hands-on technical depth, drive the 10x scaling initiative, and partner with executives to translate strategy into concrete roadmaps while mentoring senior engineers.

Qualifications

• Track record of operating at Staff/Senior Staff/Principal level in distributed systems, infrastructure or platform engineering.
• Ability to set architectural direction across teams and personally deliver deep technical work.
• Experience resolving architectural disagreements between teams via technical credibility.
• Comfort operating with significant ambiguity on multi-quarter, cross-domain initiatives.
• Strong written and verbal communication; translate technical judgment into actionable direction for engineers and executives.
• Nice-to-have: prior architecture-function experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for cross-domain architecture initiatives, incl. long-horizon platform decisions.
• Design and drive the most complex, high-risk changes as a hands-on contributor.
• Maintain deep hands-on expertise to write, debug and review designs and code.
• Identify and resolve architectural conflicts between service domains; make binding technical calls.
• Coordinate evolution efforts across domains and multi-quarter timelines.
• Act as senior technical authority for architecture decisions requiring deep systems expertise.
• Partner with engineering leads and executives to translate strategy into sequenced roadmaps.
• Mentor senior engineers working on cross-domain problems without direct management responsibility.

Skills

Distributed systems

Infrastructure

Platform engineering

Cross-team influence

Technical leadership

Hands-on depth

Architectural direction

Communication

Job description

Aiven is building a dedicated Architecture function and seeks a senior individual-contributor who can set direction and personally tackle the hardest engineering work to prove it out. This role anchors the future of our platform, guiding cross-domain decisions and long-horizon evolution across services.

You will maintain hands-on technical depth, drive the 10x scaling initiative, and partner with executives to translate strategy into concrete roadmaps while mentoring senior engineers.