Role Overview
The Systems Architect is responsible for designing, evolving, and enforcing Inventeer’s operating architecture: the repeatable systems that make delivery predictable, quality measurable, and outcomes scalable across teams and products. This is a senior, leverage-driven role. Success is measured by reduced chaos, increased throughput, higher consistency, and lower dependency on individual heroics—through clear standards, reusable patterns, automation, and governance that enable teams to ship safely and repeatedly (including audit-ready practices when required).
Key Responsibilities
Operating Architecture & Standards
- Design and maintain Inventeer’s end-to-end delivery system: intake → planning → execution → release → support/maintenance.
- Define and continuously improve standards for architecture, codebase conventions, environments, and release practices.
- Establish “golden paths” and reference implementations that teams can adopt quickly.
System Design for Scale (Build-Once / Sell-Many)
- Architect product and platform patterns that support multi-tenant scale, repeatable deployments, and controlled customization.
- Define boundaries between products, shared services, and internal platforms to reduce coupling and increase replaceability.
- Ensure that new initiatives align with the long-term structure (avoid one-off complexity).
Governance, Quality & Compliance Readiness
- Define enforceable quality gates: Definition of Done patterns, PR standards, release checklists, and reliability criteria.
- Collaborate with security/compliance stakeholders to embed auditability, access control, change management, and evidence collection into the operating system.
- Ensure governance is implemented as defaults and automation—not manual policing.
Enablement & Cross-Team Alignment
- Act as an internal enablement function: unblock teams by providing patterns, templates, architecture reviews, and decision frameworks.
- Run lightweight architecture review processes that accelerate decisions without slowing delivery.
- Align stakeholders across engineering/product/ops around tradeoffs, priorities, and implementation sequencing.
Automation & Leverage Systems
- Identify recurring friction and replace it with automation (workflows, scripts, templates, checkers, dashboards).
- Create operating dashboards and mechanisms for visibility (delivery health, bottlenecks, operational risk, technical debt signals).
- Improve reliability by pushing learning into systems (postmortems → standards → automation).
Required Technical Skills
- Deep experience in software architecture across services, data models, and deployment patterns.
- Strong understanding of SDLC systems: planning, release engineering, quality gates, and operational feedback loops.
- Hands-on capability to produce executable architecture outcomes (reference implementations, templates, automation), not just diagrams.
- Strong knowledge of cloud-native patterns and reliability fundamentals (deployments, observability, incident patterns, rollback strategies).
- Strong documentation and decision-record discipline (RFCs, ADRs, standards, runbooks, conventions).
- Ability to design governance that is scalable and low-friction (defaults, guardrails, automation).
Nice to Have
- Experience in compliance/audit-ready environments (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and translating controls into engineering systems.
- Experience designing internal platforms (paved roads), reusable frameworks, or “developer experience” systems.
- Familiarity with multi-tenant SaaS architecture, entitlements, and customer isolation strategies.
- Experience with GCP, Kubernetes ecosystems, and GitOps practices (helpful for concrete alignment with the platform).
Behavioral Expectations
- Leverage mindset: builds systems that reduce future work and increase team velocity.
- Clarity over complexity: prefers simple, enforceable standards over abstract ideals.
- Pragmatic governance: creates guardrails that help teams ship faster and safer (not bureaucracy).
- Strong decision-making: makes tradeoffs explicit, documents decisions, and keeps teams aligned.
- Enablement-first leadership: unblocks, teaches, and scales others through patterns and systems.
- Ownership of outcomes: measures success by predictable delivery, quality consistency, and reduced operational drag.