Software and Integration Architect

Job description

**Who are we?** Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008. **Summary** As a Software and Integration Architect at Smarsh, you will define and execute the software and integration architecture that connects Smarsh’s operational systems and 12+ product platforms. This role blends general software and cloud architecture with integration architecture, requiring strong system design skills across backend services, cloud infrastructure, and user-facing applications. You will serve as the technical leader for custom application development on Smarsh’s custom IT platform, delivering applications for users across the business, not just the backend systems that support them. This includes the systems responsible for provisioning all Smarsh products, tracking and billing more than $120M in annual revenue from customer overages and growing, and enabling the reliable flow of telemetry data across the platform. You will also be the technical leader for all integrations across IT and Operations at Smarsh, owning the end-to-end integration landscape company-wide, excluding only integrations built into Smarsh’s own products. This is a hands-on, high-impact role. Expert-level AWS and software architecture skills are the priority: you will lead the design and build of scalable, cloud-native architectures leveraging AWS services, microservices-based designs, distributed systems, and modern web applications. Integrations are built primarily on AWS and MuleSoft, with Python as our core language, and you should expect to be hands-on-keyboard alongside the team. Central to this role is our AI-SDLC methodology, an AI-native software development lifecycle in which we use a variety of AI models alongside AI coding tools as a core part of how we design, build, test, and ship software. As an architect, you will not just work within this methodology but help define and advance it, setting the standard for how the team builds with AI. We work with Claude as well as ChatGPT, Ollama, and other leading and open-source tools, and we expect you to stay invested in the rapidly evolving AI landscape and bring the best of it into the team’s day-to-day work. You will work closely with all areas of Smarsh’s business to ensure seamless connectivity across systems and platforms, from backend services through customer- and internal-facing user experiences. ### How will you contribute? - Operate as a technical leader of the team, working alongside the Sr. Full Stack Developer and Engineering Manager to drive the technical direction of projects from design through delivery. - Lead the architecture and development of custom applications on Smarsh’s custom IT platform, serving users across the business. - Own the architecture, standards, and delivery for all integrations across IT and Operations, built primarily on AWS and MuleSoft with Python as the core language. - Own the systems that support provisioning, billing, telemetry, product usage tracking, and revenue streams across Smarsh’s product ecosystem. - Design cloud-native, microservices-based architectures with clear service boundaries, scalable communication patterns, and fault tolerance. - Lead hands-on development of backend services and integration components using Python, AWS Lambda, MuleSoft, and other cloud-native and integration technologies. - Guide the architecture of modern, user-facing web applications, partnering with the team to deliver polished, performant experiences backed by clean API contracts. - Define, advance, and set the standard for our AI-SDLC methodology, using AI coding tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, and other leading and open-source options as a core part of the development lifecycle, and establishing patterns and guardrails for safe, consistent AI-assisted development. - Architect and build AI tooling that extends AI capabilities into the team’s workflows, including Claude plugins and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. - Own the cloud infrastructure lifecycle using infrastructure-as-code, and define CI/CD and release engineering practices with automated testing, deployment safety, and rollback strategies. - Lead observability and operational readiness across systems, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and cloud cost awareness. - Translate architectural designs into clear Jira epics, stories, and tasks, and guide technical prioritization in collaboration with Engineering leadership within Agile delivery. - Design testing strategies for large, distributed systems, including integration, end-to-end, performance, and failure scenario testing. - Provide architectural direction and technical mentorship across the team, and establish and maintain software and integration architecture standards, governance, and best practices. ### What will you bring? - 10+ years of experience in software and integration architecture, including significant ownership of large-scale, distributed systems. - Expert-level AWS and software architecture experience, including designing and building production systems using services such as Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS/DynamoDB, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, and event-driven components. - Proficiency in Python for building services, automation, and integration logic, with a genuine willingness to be hands-on-keyboard; experience with other object-oriented languages (e.g., Java, C#) is a plus. - Strong experience designing and delivering modern web applications, with fluency in current front-end frameworks and patterns (e.g., React or similar), component-driven architecture, and the practicalities of building responsive, accessible user experiences on top of well-designed APIs. - Track record building production integrations on AWS and on enterprise integration platforms such as MuleSoft, with a clear understanding of how a dedicated integration platform fits alongside a cloud-native AWS ecosystem. - Demonstrated fluency with AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, and other leading and open-source options) as part of an AI-first development workflow, with a track record of bringing new tools into team practice; experience building Claude plugins or MCP servers is a plus. - Deep understanding of microservices architectures, including service decomposition, API design, asynchronous messaging, resiliency, and scalability patterns. - Experience designing secure, scalable APIs and integration patterns (REST, event-driven, batch), with a strong grounding in authentication, authorization, and data protection.