Senior Software Architect (Hybrid)

Socket.dev; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Xceleration is seeking a Senior Software Architect to own how our systems are designed, modernized, and built. This is a senior technical leadership role, not a senior coding role, with collaboration across architect peers and hands-on coding.

You’ll lead end-to-end architecture, plan migrations, balance constraints, and guide contract resources while maintaining practical, code-focused delivery. This role shapes our platform across data, APIs, and front-end.

Qualifications

• Extensive full-stack experience across backend, frontend, data, and infra.
• Genuine polyglot instincts: pick up new languages/frameworks as needed.
• Cloud, CI/CD and production-operations literacy, supporting what you ship.
• Track record of system design work you can walk us through.
• Legacy assessment and modernization experience with strangler-fig patterns.
• Security, compliance, and scalability treated as design inputs.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end: data model, services, APIs, front end and integrations.
• Plan migrations by decomposing systems into incremental steps.
• Balance tradeoffs among speed, maintainability, performance, security, scalability and cost.
• Build and codify patterns; stay in the code and prototype risky parts.
• Lead contract and offshore resources with clear direction and standards.
• Explain options and risks to non-technical stakeholders in plain language.
• Define standards for AI-assisted development and review outputs.

Skills

Full-stack experience

Polyglot instincts

Cloud, CI/CD

AI-native coding

Architectural leadership

Communication

Tools

Claude Code

OpenAI Codex

Cursor

GitHub Copilot

Windsurf

Cline

Aider

Devin

Job description

At Xceleration, we design employee recognition and reward programs that truly connect people to their work. Our RewardStation® platform is used worldwide for everything from peer-to-peer recognition to service milestones, allowing companies to create experiences that reflect their values and reward employees in meaningful ways. We’re proud to work across more than 90 countries, delivering solutions that adapt to different cultures and work environments. Joining Xceleration means working with cutting-edge technology while being part of a team that values input and collaboration. Our environment is designed to help you grow, contribute, and see your efforts directly impact how companies engage and motivate their employees. If you’re looking for a space where your ideas can shape the future of workplace recognition, Xceleration is the place.

We build RewardStation, an enterprise employee recognition and rewards platform trusted by major brands to engage their workforces. Our Maslow analytics platform transforms recognition data into actionable insights. We serve enterprise clients with multi-tenant SaaS architecture processing millions of recognition events and rewards transactions.

We're looking for a Senior Software Architect to own how our systems are designed, modernized, and built. This is a senior technical leadership role, not a senior coding role. You'll collaborate with architect peers on the direction for the technology, and you'll still be in the code. You'll be handed existing systems, requirements for systems that don’t exist yet, and asked what they should become, and trusted to chart a route that's actually walkable - with peers, contract engineers and AI coding agents doing much of the walking alongside you.

What you'll do

• Architect end-to-end. Design flows and system boundaries across the full stack - data model, services, APIs, front end, integrations - and own the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
• Read existing systems and plan their future. Take apart a working system, find where the real complexity and risk live, and produce a migration roadmap to a new platform or architecture that is sequenced, incremental, and something a team can execute without a long term freeze.
• Balance the real constraints. Every architecture is a trade among speed to market, maintainability, performance, security, scalability, and cost. You'll make those trades deliberately, write down why, and revisit them when the business changes.
• Build, not just diagram. Stay in the code. Prototype the risky part first. Set the patterns the rest of the team follows by writing them.
• Lead contract resources. Scope work, set technical direction and standards, review output, and keep distributed or contract engineers productive and aligned - without becoming the bottleneck.
• Translate. Explain options, risks, and costs to non-technical stakeholders in plain language, so the business can make an informed call rather than defer to whoever sounds most certain.
• Work AI-natively. Use coding agents as a primary tool for delivery, and set the standards for how the rest of the team does the same.

Desired skills and experience:

Engineering depth

• Extensive full-stack experience - comfortable owning back end, front end, data, and infrastructure concerns
• Genuine polyglot instincts: you pick up new languages, frameworks, and platforms because the problem calls for it, not because you were assigned a training course
• Cloud, CI/CD, and production-operations literacy - you've supported what you've shipped

Architecture & modernization

• A track record of system design work you can walk us through: what you chose, what you rejected, what broke, what you'd do differently
• Legacy assessment and modernization experience - strangler-fig patterns, incremental decomposition, data migration, dual-run and cutover strategies
• Security, compliance, and scalability treated as design inputs, not a hardening pass at the end

AI-native practice

• Expert, daily user of AI coding agents - Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Cline, Aider, Devin, or equivalents — and opinionated about where each one earns its keep
• Fluent in the concepts that separate good agent use from slot-machine prompting: context engineering and context-window management, prompt engineering, MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, skills, subagents and agentic loops, tool use, RAG, evals, spec-driven development, and sandboxing/guardrails
• Disciplined about reviewing agent output - you know that generated code you haven't understood is a liability, and you build the review and testing practices that keep it from becoming one
• Able to set team-level standards for AI-assisted development: what gets delegated, what gets human eyes, how quality is verified

Leadership & communication

• Experience directing contract, offshore, or vendor engineering resources to a real outcome
• Comfortable shifting direction when priorities move - you treat a changed plan as new information, not as wasted work
• You can hold a conversation with a stakeholder who doesn't care about the architecture, and leave them understanding their choices
• Strong written communication: design docs, ADRs, roadmaps that people actually read

Nice to have

• Modern front-end depth (React, TypeScript, or equivalent)
• Experience with .NET/C#, Nodejs, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL
• Amazon Web Services
• OIDC/OAuth2 authentication concepts
• Event-driven, message queueing or distributed-systems experience
• Having built internal tooling, MCP servers, or agent workflows for a team
• Mentorship or technical-leadership history with junior and mid-level engineers

Xceleration is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, and gender expression, religious creed, disability (mental and physical) including HIV and AIDS, medical condition (cancer and genetic characteristics), genetic information, age, marital status, sexual orientation, military and veteran status, denial of family and medical care leave, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.