Chief Architect

Asurion Insurance Services; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Asurion Insurance Services in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sterling, VA, or Nashville, TN, is seeking a hands-on Chief Architect to lead software architecture for high-traffic production platforms. You will stay close to design decisions, prototypes, and critical implementations while guiding security, reliability, and platform standards.

You will drive architecture reviews, establish design patterns, and mentor a team of architects, shaping AI strategy and cloud decisions to support business

Qualifications

• Hands-on software architecture for high-traffic production systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, IaC, automation, and release engineering.
• Security-by-design and threat modeling.
• Reliability and performance engineering at scale.
• SOA, event-driven, API-first design.
• Cloud-native architecture on major public clouds.
• Cross-discipline collaboration with data and infrastructure teams.
• Familiarity with AI/ML architecture and model serving.
• Legacy modernization and monolith decomposition.
• Cost efficiency and cloud cost optimization.
• Strong code-level review capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Set and own software architecture direction for high-traffic production platforms.
• Lead cross-team architecture projects to meet security, reliability, and maintainability standards.
• Chair architecture review forum and maintain auditable decision records.
• Establish and maintain design patterns, service standards, and reference implementations.
• Embed security by design into architecture and development lifecycle.
• Set reliability and performance engineering standards at scale.
• Define CI/CD, IaC, automated testing, and progressive delivery standards.
• Lead architectural diagnosis and remediation for incidents.
• Own the technical debt strategy and remediation roadmaps.
• Guide build-versus-buy and platform selection for executive leadership.

Skills

Software architecture

DevOps CI/CD

Security by design

Reliability & performance

SOA / event-driven / API-first

Cloud-native

Infrastructure knowledge

AI/ML architecture

Legacy modernization

Cost optimization

Code review

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Location

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, Sterling, VA, or Nashville, TN or areas commutable to these locations strongly preferred.

Reports to

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer Chief Architect

The Chief Architect is the senior technical authority for software architecture across Asurion's production platforms, reporting to the CTO. This is a hands-on software architecture role rather than an enterprise architecture function: it requires current, practitioner-level judgment earned building and operating systems in high-traffic, high-volume production environments. Sets architectural direction and standards for how services are designed, built, secured, deployed, and operated, and holds final decision rights on architecture that spans teams. Leads a small team of architects while influencing a much larger engineering organization laterally, through credibility rather than reporting lines. Reasons about long-term technology direction, including artificial intelligence strategy, open-source model adoption, and research and development investment, and connects architectural choices to business outcomes.

Essential Job Skills/Duties

• Set and own software architecture direction for high-traffic, high-volume production platforms, remaining hands-on in design reviews, prototypes, and critical implementation decisions.
• Responsible for supporting cross-team architecture projects to completion, ensuring it meets standards for security, reliability, and maintainability.
• Chair an architecture review forum and maintain auditable architecture decision records so that trade-offs and their rationale are durable.
• Establish and maintain design patterns, service standards, and reference implementations, and drive adoption through engagement with delivery teams rather than mandate.
• Embed security by design into architecture and the development lifecycle from inception, defining what good looks like and making the secure path the default path.
• Set reliability and performance engineering standards at scale, including service level objectives, observability, capacity and load planning, failure-mode analysis, and resilience patterns.
• Partner to define and deploy delivery engineering standards spanning CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, progressive delivery, and release safety.
• Lead architectural diagnosis and remediation for significant production incidents, converting findings into durable design change.
• Own the technical debt strategy: identify architecture that constrains the business, quantify the impact, and sequence remediation into delivery roadmaps.
• Guide build-versus-buy and platform selection decisions and advise executive leadership on long-term technology direction.
• Shape artificial intelligence strategy from an architecture standpoint, including open-source model adoption, build-versus-buy for AI capabilities, and research and development investment priorities.
• Partner with the Data Architect and infrastructure leaders on data and platform decisions, integrating their depth rather than duplicating it.
• Connect architectural decisions to business outcomes - cost, speed, risk, and customer experience - for engineering and executive audiences alike.

Required Technical Skills

• Hands-on software architecture and design of distributed systems operating at high traffic and high volume in production.
• Deep, practitioner-level DevOps expertise across CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automation, and release engineering. This is a core requirement of the role.
• Security by design, including threat modeling, secure development lifecycle, identity and access patterns, encryption, and secrets management.
• Reliability and performance engineering at scale: service level objectives, observability, load and capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, and incident recovery.
• Service oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, and API-first integration design, including versioning and backward compatibility.
• Cloud-native architecture on a major public cloud, including containerization and orchestration.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure, networking, and data architecture sufficient to make sound cross-layer decisions and partner effectively with specialists.
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning architecture, including model serving, retrieval patterns, agent guardrails, and open-source model evaluation.
• Legacy modernization applied to live systems: monolith decomposition, incremental migration, and strangler patterns.
• Engineering cost efficiency, including cloud cost optimization and the architectural levers that drive run rate.
• Code-level fluency sufficient to review critical designs and implementations credibly.

Required Soft/Leadership Skills

• High emotional intelligence; reads organizational dynamics and adapts approach accordingly.
• Influences laterally through credibility and expertise rather than reporting authority.
• Declines proposals constructively, redirecting teams toward better outcomes without alienating them.
• Brings enginee