Chief Architect

Chief Architect

Company: Legion Technologies
Location: Remote - US

Job Overview

Legion Technologies is building the AI-powered operating system for the hourly workforce. We are seeking a Chief Architect to serve as the company's most senior hands-on technical leader. This role will shape the technical foundation for the next decade of product innovation. This is not a strategy-only or advisory role; the Chief Architect must be deeply involved with engineering teams, challenge assumptions, write and review technical designs, make high-consequence architecture decisions, and guide the transformation of bold product ambitions into scalable, reliable production systems. You will own architecture and technical decision-making for the most complex parts of Legion’s Workforce Management platform, including AI, optimization, forecasting, scheduling, distributed systems, data platforms, real-time decisioning, enterprise scalability, security, compliance, and developer productivity.

Responsibilities

Hands-On Architecture and Technical Decision-Making

• Serve as Legion’s senior-most hands-on technical authority for complex architecture, system design, and platform evolution.
• Dive into code, design documents, production incidents, and performance bottlenecks to diagnose root causes and guide technical direction.
• Lead critical technical decisions across AI systems, optimization engines, distributed systems, data architecture, reliability, scalability, security, and platform modernization.
• Write prototypes, reference implementations, architecture decision records, and technical specifications as needed.
• Make high-consequence technical decisions with incomplete information, balancing correctness, simplicity, speed, scalability, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Challenge architectural drift, complexity, weak abstractions, and short-term decisions that create long-term risk.
• Partner directly with Staff, Principal, and senior engineering leaders in design reviews and implementation planning.

Platform Architecture and Technical Vision

• Define and own the long-term architecture for Legion’s AI-driven Workforce Management platform across application services, data infrastructure, ML systems, optimization engines, APIs, integration architecture, developer platforms, and enterprise-scale operations.
• Establish engineering-wide standards for system design, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, observability, security, and maintainability.
• Serve as the final architectural authority for major platform initiatives and technical decisions.
• Identify opportunities to reduce complexity, improve system efficiency, accelerate engineering velocity, and unlock new product capabilities.
• Proactively surface technical debt, architectural risk, and platform constraints.
• Create pragmatic migration paths from current-state to target-state architecture while maintaining uptime, customer trust, backward compatibility, and delivery speed.
• Ensure architecture supports enterprise configurability and extensibility.

AI, Optimization, and Decision Systems

• Architect AI-native product capabilities across forecasting, scheduling, labor optimization, recommendations, copilots, anomaly detection, and decision automation.
• Define the architecture for production AI systems, including data pipelines, feature platforms, model training, model serving, evaluation, monitoring, and feedback loops.
• Make clear build-versus-buy decisions for LLMs, classical ML, optimization solvers, retrieval systems, and AI platforms.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to turn complex labor optimization problems into reliable, scalable, explainable production systems.
• Establish standards for AI system quality, including accuracy, latency, cost, explainability, drift detection, and reliability.

Distributed Systems, Data, and Enterprise Scale

• Drive architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS systems serving complex enterprise customers with high availability, performance, security, and compliance expectations.
• Lead technical decisions involving microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed data processing, real-time systems, data governance, and large-scale analytics.
• Improve architecture for observability, incident analysis, performance engineering, capacity planning, and reliability.

Product, Business, and Customer Impact

• Connect technical decisions directly to customer value, product velocity, implementation speed, scalability, and reliability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to translate product goals into executable architecture and technical roadmaps.
• Understand enterprise customer complexity and design systems that support real-world operational variability.

Engineering Culture and Technical Talent

• Mentor and elevate Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, architects, and senior engineering leaders.
• Raise the bar for technical judgment, system design, architecture reviews, documentation, code quality, and operational discipline.
• Help assess, attract, and develop senior technical talent.
• Build a culture of disciplined technical thinking, direct debate, clear decision-making, and pragmatic execution.

Security, Compliance, and Enterprise Readiness

• Own the architectural approach to enterprise security, data governance, privacy, compliance, auditability, and resilience.
• Ensure architecture supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, data residency, access control, tenant isolation, and regulatory requirements.

Required Skills and Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience building and scaling large-scale software systems.
• Prior experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Principal Architect, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Demonstrated success designing and scaling mission-critical, multi-tenant SaaS platforms for enterprise customers.
• Deep hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, data platforms, APIs, event-driven systems, and high-availability production environments.
• Proven ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader credible in code-level and design-level discussions with senior engineers.
• Experience making major architecture decisions for systems with high scale, reliability requirements, and complex domain logic.
• Experience modernizing large production systems incrementally.
• Experience building or supporting AI, ML, optimization, decisioning, forecasting, or data-intensive products in production.
• Strong understanding of observability, incident response, performance engineering, reliability architecture, and operational excellence.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineering teams, executives, customers, and cross-functional partners.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, cloud architecture, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and large-scale data processing.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong experience with modern engineering practices (architecture reviews, design documents, code reviews, testing, deployment, observability, production operations).
• Experience with languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Scala, or similar backend languages.
• Strong architectural judgment, pragmatic builder mindset, decisive, and comfortable making tradeoffs.

Preferred Qualifications and Attributes

• Experience building platforms used by millions of users or supporting very large-scale enterprise operations.
• Experience at companies known for large-scale distributed systems, AI, cloud infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, workforce management, or similar complex domains.
• Familiarity with optimization engines, scheduling algorithms, forecasting systems, constraint solvers, or real-time decision systems.
• Experience architecting AI-native product capabilities, including LLM-enabled workflows, AI agents, model evaluation, and production monitoring.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, data platforms, ML pipelines, or large-scale analytics systems.
• Experience designing highly configurable enterprise platforms.
• Experience participating in strategic customer architecture reviews or technical due diligence.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary Range: Base Salary $300,000 - $385,000 + Bonus + Stock Equity.
• Competitive compensation and benefits packages. Pay determined using local, national, and industry-specific survey data. Range may be refined for candidate's region.