Distinguished Engineer, Platform Architecture
Our client is a publicly traded enterprise software company whose platform automates and orchestrates complex business processes for large organizations. Their technology supports high volume, mission-critical workflows where performance, reliability, scalability, and architectural discipline are essential.
The company is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to join its Foundations engineering group. This team owns the core technical capabilities that enable the platform to scale, perform, and support increasingly complex enterprise use cases.
This is a senior individual contributor role with broad architectural influence across the engineering organization. The Distinguished Engineer will work across multiple development teams to shape platform strategy, lead enterprise-level technical initiatives, establish architectural direction, and ensure the platform continues to scale for increasingly complex automation, orchestration, and data-intensive workloads.
This role is well-suited for a deeply experienced engineer who has operated as a technical authority in complex software environments, influenced engineering direction across teams, partnered with senior product and engineering leaders, and translated ambiguous business needs into durable technical architecture.
What You’ll Do:
- Serve as a senior technical authority across the Foundations engineering group and broader engineering organization.
- Lead enterprise-level technical initiatives from problem definition through architecture, execution, adoption, and long-term operational success.
- Define and influence platform architecture across performance, reliability, scalability, extensibility, and developer productivity.
- Partner with engineering, product, and executive leadership to evaluate technical tradeoffs, investment needs, roadmap implications, and architectural risk.
- Translate complex business and product priorities into clear technical direction, sequencing, and decision frameworks.
- Work across multiple engineering teams to provide architecture guidance, design review, and hands-on technical leadership where depth is needed.
- Identify systemic technical constraints that limit scale, reliability, engineering velocity, or product flexibility, and lead the work to resolve them.
- Develop prototypes, proofs of concept, and technical approaches that create architectural runway for future product development.
- Own a functional or operational area within the architecture group, with accountability for technical quality, standards, direction, and long-term health.
- Establish engineering best practices, design standards, and technical documentation that create consistency across teams.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders, raising the quality of architectural thinking and execution across the organization.
- Represent complex technical recommendations to executive and non-technical stakeholders in a clear, practical, business-aligned way.
What We’re Looking For
The ideal candidate brings deep software engineering expertise, exceptional architectural judgment, and a track record of influencing technical direction across complex engineering organizations.
Required qualifications include:
- 20+ years of software development experience, with substantial experience in SaaS, enterprise software, or large-scale platform environments.
- Deep fluency in Java and broad technical depth across modern software architecture.
- Experience building, scaling, and operating high-volume, mission-critical production services.
- Demonstrated success leading large, cross-functional technical initiatives with meaningful platform, product, or business impact.
- Proven ability to influence architecture and engineering direction across multiple teams without relying solely on formal authority.
- Ability to convert ambiguous business, product, or technical challenges into clear architecture, technical strategy, and execution plans.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, data platforms, workflow engines, performance engineering, or enterprise automation architecture.
- Experience partnering with senior product, engineering, and executive stakeholders on technical strategy, risk, tradeoffs, and investment decisions.
- Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
- B.S. in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Preferred qualifications include:
- M.S. in Computer Science or related field.
- Prior experience operating at the Distinguished Engineer, Principal Engineer, Chief Architect, or equivalent technical leadership level.
- Prior ownership of a functional or operational area within an architecture, platform, foundations, or core engineering group.
- Experience with workflow orchestration, business process management, data fabric, agentic automation, or enterprise automation platforms.
- History of publishing technical standards, architecture guidance, engineering documentation, or internal technical strategy content at scale.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, principal engineers, architects, or technical leads.
Why This Role Is Compelling
This is a high-impact Distinguished Engineer opportunity inside a mature, publicly traded enterprise software company. The work sits close to the core of the platform and directly affects performance, reliability, scalability, engineering velocity, and the company’s ability to support increasingly complex customer needs.
The role offers:
- Broad influence over long-term platform architecture and technical direction.
- Visibility with senior engineering, product, and executive leadership.
- The opportunity to shape technical standards across an engineering organization of 175+ engineers.
- Complex, business-critical platform problems with real production impact.
- A senior individual contributor path with meaningful authority, influence, and technical scope.
- Strong compensation, including a $260K to $300K base salary, 15% target bonus, and annual RSU grants vesting over four years.
- A culture that values technical excellence, architecture discipline, mentorship, documentation, and durable engineering decisions.
IN-OFFICE: 5 days/week
Benefits
Health coverage and EAP ·Employee Stock Purchase Plan· Tuition reimbursement ·Retirement / pension · Wellness dollars ·Family-forming benefits · Life and disability insurance
