Principal Solutions Architect, Conduct
About the role
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
The Enterprise Architect is a senior technical leadership role accountable for the architectural direction, integrity, and long-term evolution of Smarsh’s Conduct platform — a strategic growth engine for the company. This role owns the system-level architecture across services, data, integrations, and platform capabilities, ensuring the platform can scale globally while meeting the rigor of highly regulated environments. This is not a feature-level architecture role. It requires enterprise-level systems thinking, the ability to make consequential architectural decisions, and the judgment to balance near-term delivery with multi-year platform evolution.
How will you contribute?
- Architectural Direction & Platform Evolution
- Define and enforce a coherent architectural strategy aligned with product vision and long-term platform evolution.
- Make and defend high-impact design decisions with multi-year implications.
- Lead structural changes required to support scale, extensibility, new communication channels, and AI-enabled supervision capabilities.
- Product & Cross-Functional Partnership
- Partner with Product Management to translate market and customer needs into durable architectural requirements.
- Align Engineering, Product, Compliance, and customer-facing leadership around architectural trade-offs and investment priorities.
- Negotiate effectively with demanding internal and external stakeholders.
- Regulatory-Grade, Enterprise-Scale Design
- Architect resilient, secure-by-design, auditable systems capable of operating at petabyte-scale enterprise data volumes across global deployments.
- Translate regulatory and compliance requirements into concrete architectural patterns and controls.
- AI Platform Enablement
- Establish governed integration patterns for AI services within Conduct workflows.
- Enable AI use cases such as: AI-assisted policy violation detection and behavioral signal analysis, Investigator workflow acceleration (summarization, prioritization, case insights), Embed responsible AI principles — privacy, security, fairness, transparency, auditability, and explainability — into platform architecture, Ensure AI-enabled components meet standards for reliability, observability, cost control, and performance.
- Hands-On Technical Leadership
- Prototype and validate architectural approaches.
- Conduct deep design reviews and trade-off analysis.
- Troubleshoot production-scale issues involving performance, scalability, and distributed systems behavior.
- Coach and mentor engineers to elevate architectural capability across teams.
What will you bring?
- Core Competencies
- Enterprise Platform Architecture: Proven ownership of architecture across business-critical, multi-service platforms, with direct contribution to design and delivery — not solely in an advisory or governance capacity.
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong command of event-driven architectures, data-intensive systems, and large-scale ingestion and processing pipelines. Hands-on experience with Java, Kafka or equivalent event streaming technologies, and microservices design patterns.
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Experience designing and operating cloud-native systems on AWS (primary), Azure, or GCP, including compute, storage, networking, identity, and managed data services.
- Security & Compliance Mindset: Ability to design for auditability, data privacy, and regulatory requirements (e.g., FINRA, SEC, MiFID II, GDPR).