Director, Platform Architecture

The Director of Platform Architecture is a visionary technical leader responsible for defining, governing, and continuously evolving the architectural foundation that powers our products, platforms, and Engineering organization. This leader owns the technical blueprint of how our systems are designed, how services communicate, how data flows, and how AI capabilities are embedded across the platform — ensuring that every architectural decision made today accelerates our ability to innovate, scale, and compete tomorrow. 

The Director of Platform Architecture works in close partnership with Engineering Managers, Product teams, and Senior Engineers to make architecture real — translating vision into patterns, guardrails, and working systems that Engineering teams can build on with confidence.  

Starting base pay for this role is between $175,000 and $222,000. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as transferable skills, work experience, business needs, training, location, and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role will be eligible for a bonus as well as competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits, wellness reimbursement, life insurance, and a 401(k) with company match. We offer vacation and sick leave benefits (under a flexible time off policy in most states).

Platform Architecture Strategy & Vision 

• Defines and owns the enterprise platform architecture strategy — establishing the technical vision for how our systems, services, APIs, and data layers are designed to support product innovation, client scale, and competitive differentiation. 

• Develops and maintains architecture principles, patterns, and guardrails that guide Engineering teams toward consistent, scalable, and maintainable system design across back-end, API, and integration layers. 

• Leads architectural runway planning in partnership with the VP of Engineering and Product leadership — ensuring architectural investments stay ahead of product demand and organizational growth. 

• Evaluates and makes deliberate decisions on foundational technology choices — including frameworks, cloud services, messaging patterns, data stores, and AI/ML integration approaches — balancing innovation with operational sustainability. 

• Owns the architecture decision record (ADR) process, ensuring significant architectural decisions are documented, peer-reviewed, and accessible to the broader engineering organization. 

AI-First Platform Design 

• Champions an AI-first design philosophy across the platform — ensuring that AI capabilities, including LLM integration, intelligent workflow orchestration, and ML-powered services, are treated as first-class architectural concerns rather than afterthoughts. 

• Defines architectural patterns for AI capability integration, including API design standards for LLM-powered services, prompt management patterns, model versioning strategies, and AI observability requirements. 

• Partners with the AI Platform & Backend Services Engineering team to ensure AI capabilities are exposed through well-governed, composable APIs that Product AI Engineers can consume with confidence. 

• Establishes architectural standards for responsible AI integration — including data privacy boundaries, model input/output validation, fallback behaviors, and latency expectations for AI-powered service calls. 

• Stays at the forefront of AI platform engineering practices, evaluating emerging patterns and tools and translating them into actionable architectural guidance for the Engineering organization. 

Back-End & API Architecture Governance 

• Owns back-end and API architecture standards across the Engineering organization — governing service decomposition, API contract design, versioning policies, inter-service communication patterns, and data ownership boundaries. 

• Provides architectural oversight to the Manager of Back-End Software Engineering and Manager of Technical Software Engineering — ensuring that engineering work executed within those teams is architecturally sound, consistently patterned, and aligned with the platform roadmap. 

• Leads architecture reviews for significant new systems, features, and integrations — providing structured, actionable feedback that elevates design quality without becoming a bottleneck to delivery. 

• Partners with the API Access Control Manager to ensure that API security architecture, authentication and authorization patterns, and access governance are embedded into the platform architecture model rather than bolted on after the fact. 

• Defines and governs microservices architecture standards — including service boundary principles, data isolation patterns, event-driven communication standards, and distributed system resilience practices. 

Cloud-Native & Infrastructure Architecture 

• Owns cloud architecture standards for the engineering organization's AWS environment — defining how applications are structured for cloud-native deployment across Lambda, containers, Step Functions, Temporal, and managed AWS services. 

• Partner with the Director of DevOps and Cloud Operations to ensure that platform architecture decisions are operationally viable — designing systems that are not only functionally correct but deployable, observable, and cost-efficient at scale. 

• Establishes data architecture standards across the platform — governing database selection, schema design principles, caching patterns, event streaming approaches, and data migration practices via Flyway. 

• Drives architectural alignment on infrastructure-as-code practices, ensuring that infrastructure design is treated as an architectural concern and that cloud resource structures reflect intentional, governed design decisions. 

• Evaluates and guides adoption of new AWS services and cloud-native capabilities, translating platform-level infrastructure innovation into architectural patterns that engineering teams can adopt consistently. 

Engineering Enablement & Standards 

• Builds and maintains a living architecture reference — including documented patterns, example implementations, architecture diagrams, and decision records — that serves as the definitive technical guide for the engineering organization. 

• Runs architecture guilds, design forums, and technical review sessions that create space for Engineering teams to engage with platform architecture, raise design questions, and contribute to architectural evolution. 

• Partners with the Director of Engineering Systems to ensure that engineering standards for coding, API design, and service structure are architecturally grounded and consistently applied across all teams. 

• Hires, mentors, and develops Senior Engineers and Technical Leads across the organization, elevating the architectural thinking of the broader engineering team and building a pipeline of future architects. 

• Contribute to Engineering hiring and team structure decisions, providing technical input on role design, leveling decisions, and capability gaps from an architectural perspective. 

• Leads all performance management and compensation-related activities for assigned team members, including providing continuous coaching and feedback and completing year-end reviews. 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree a plus. 

• Software Engineering experience, including in a Principal, Staff, or Architect-level role with organization-wide technical influence. 

• Demonstrated experience defining and governing enterprise platform architecture across back-end services, APIs, and cloud-native infrastructure. 

• Deep expertise in .NET / C# and cloud-native AWS architecture patterns including Lambda, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, API Gateway, and event-driven messaging. 

• Strong track record of embedding AI capabilities into platform architecture, including LLM integration, AI service design, and responsible AI architectural practices. 

• Experience leading architecture governance processes including design reviews, ADRs, and architecture standards programs across multi-team engineering organizations. 

• Exceptional communication skills — able to convey complex architectural concepts through clear diagrams, written documentation, and verbal presentation to both technical and executive audiences. 

• Experience operating within compliance frameworks including NIST 800-53, ISO/IEC 27001, and SOC 2 from an architecture and design perspective. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with workflow orchestration architecture using Temporal or AWS Step Functions in high-scale production environments. 

• Familiarity with API security architecture patterns including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, API gateway policy enforcement, and zero-trust access models. 

• Experience with event-driven architecture and streaming platforms such as AWS EventBridge, Kafka, or Kinesis. 

• AWS certification at the professional or specialty level (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect – Professional). 

• Experience building internal architecture enablement programs, including guilds, design forums, and architecture documentation repositories. 

• Medical and Dental coverage available for employees, dependents, domestic partners, and spouses
• Paid Time Off – Flexible options plus 10 paid company holidays where available**
• All full-time positions are hybrid, with many eligible to be completely remote
• Fully Paid by Origami Risk – Vision insurance, Short & Long-Term Disability Insurance, and Basic Life Insurance
• Generous family leave options—including adoption and foster care placements
• Pre-Tax Savings Accounts – Flexible Spending Account, Health Savings Account, Commuter Benefits, Dependent Care Savings Account
• Retirement Savings – 401(k) with company match up to 4%
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) – Confidential & Free support offered to colleagues facing personal or work-related complications
• Education Assistance Program – to help colleagues pursue industry/role-specific certifications
• Wellness Benefits – reimbursement program to invest in healthy habits as well as support better colleague productivity and stress management
• Additional coverages available – Pet Insurance, Critical Illness Insurance, and Voluntary Life & AD&D coverage

Origami Risk delivers single-platform SaaS solutions that help organizations best navigate the complexities of risk, insurance, compliance, and safety management.

Founded by industry veterans who recognized the need for risk management technology that was more configurable, intuitive, and scalable, Origami continues to add to its innovative product offerings for managing both insurable and uninsurable risk; facilitating compliance; improving safety; and helping insurers, MGAs, TPAs, and brokers provide enhanced services that drive results.

A singular focus on client success underlies Origami’s approach to developing, implementing, and supporting our award-winning software solutions. 

Origami Risk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We thrive and benefit from diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive and equitable environment for all employees. We do not discriminate against any individual based upon race, religion, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, color, sex, national origin, age, marital status, military or veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

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