Lead Architect

Accelerant; United States; On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Accelerant is seeking a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands-on architectural leadership across our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area. This role demands strong collaboration with architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to maintain architectural alignment.

Key responsibilities include driving architectural alignment, managing dependencies, and ensuring standards-based architecture. The ideal candidate will have 8–12+ years of relevant experience and a strong understanding of both full-stack SaaS architecture and AI-enabled engineering.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years' experience in software engineering and architecture roles.
• Experience providing architectural leadership across multiple Agile teams.
• Proven ability to manage cross-team dependencies and drive alignment.
• Experience leading AI adoption within engineering organisations.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural alignment across product teams.
• Identify and address architectural gaps, technical debt, and quality risks.
• Manage cross-team dependencies and translate strategy into practical guidance.
• Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical challenges.
• Design scalable, resilient solutions for analytics, workflows, and intelligence features.

Skills

Architectural leadership

Communication

Facilitation

Stakeholder management

Cloud-native experience

AI development tools

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

GitHub Copilot

AWS

Job description

Accelerant is seeking a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands-on architectural leadership across our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area.

Operating at a Principal level, you will work across multiple autonomous product teams, partnering with architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to ensure teams move quickly while maintaining architectural alignment.

This is a highly collaborative, pragmatic role focused on identifying architectural gaps, managing dependencies, and enabling teams to execute within a shared architectural framework. You will champion standards-based architecture, leveraging web standards, open protocols, and industry best practices to build scalable, interoperable, and future-proof systems.

Key Responsibilities

Operational Architectural Leadership

• Drive architectural alignment across product teams.
• Identify and address architectural gaps, technical debt, and quality risks.
• Manage cross-team dependencies and translate strategy into practical guidance.

Cross-Team Coordination & Alignment

• Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical challenges.
• Act as an escalation point for complex cross-team issues.
• Ensure architectural decisions are communicated and consistently applied.
• Define architectural patterns across services, APIs, data platforms, and front-end systems.
• Design scalable, resilient solutions for analytics, workflows, and intelligence features.
• Guide legacy modernisation and technology selection with a focus on open standards and maintainability.

Standards & Governance

• Establish standards for APIs, front-end development, accessibility, and integrations.
• Create governance frameworks that balance consistency with team autonomy.
• Promote adoption of industry standards including OAuth2, OpenID Connect, OpenTelemetry, and JSON.

Technical Leadership

• Support engineering teams through design reviews, implementation guidance, and mentoring.
• Define standards for authentication, observability, API versioning, resiliency, and error handling.
• Partner with Platform and DevOps teams on CI/CD, containerisation, and cloud-native deployments.
• Architect customer-facing GenAI solutions including LLMs, RAG pipelines, and conversational AI.
• Define patterns for ML model integration, deployment, monitoring, and governance.
• Partner with Data Science teams to deliver production-ready AI capabilities.

AI Transformation & Productivity

• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices and development tools.
• Coach architects and senior engineers on AI-enabled development workflows.
• Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity through AI.

Solution Evaluation & Quality Assurance

• Evaluate technologies that support analytics, workflow, and intelligence capabilities.
• Ensure architectural integrity through reviews, assessments, and monitoring.
• Identify and mitigate risks relating to reliability, security, and performance.

Technical Requirements

Full Stack SaaS Architecture

• Experience designing scalable APIs and platform integrations.

Architecture & Systems Thinking

• Strong knowledge of architecture principles, design patterns, and distributed systems.
• Experience making pragmatic technical decisions in complex environments.
• Cloud-native experience, ideally within AWS.

AI-Enabled Engineering

• Experience using AI development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude.
• Understanding of AI applications for software engineering productivity and quality.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years' experience in software engineering and architecture roles.
• Experience providing architectural leadership across multiple Agile teams.
• Proven ability to manage cross-team dependencies and drive alignment.
• Experience leading AI adoption within engineering organisations.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.