Distinguished Architect, Data Technology

Inferno Studios is seeking a Distinguished Architect, Data Technology in Utah to partner with the VPs of Software Engineering, Software Architects, and Cloud Engineering in leading the Data Technology Architecture for our product. The role defines and stewards the architectural vision for the data platform, ensuring cohesive architecture across domains in collaboration with domain architects and engineering leadership. You will define multi-year data platform architecture, establish standards and guardrails, and mentor architects and principal engineers to deliver a resilient, secure, compliant, and cost-efficient multi-tenant SaaS.

Responsibilities

• Set data storage vision and reference architectures for a resilient, secure, compliant, multi-tenant SaaS, covering identity and permissions, tenancy, configuration, notifications, audit, and compliance guardrails.
• Architect and guide the evolution of data storage technology, including continuity of data, relational databases, replication strategy, caching, graphing, and multi-tenancy; collaborate with the platform team on how these systems support UDM and API platform data innovation.
• Architect and influence data technology modernization, evolving core data architecture, modernizing legacy systems, enabling scalable cloud-native patterns, and positioning the platform for future innovation and growth.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to define and communicate the product vision and strategy from a data architecture perspective; represent the architectural vision and tradeoffs to executive leadership to ensure alignment across business, product, and technology.
• Elevate internal developer capabilities by evolving the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to empower teams with standardized, self-service workflows, tooling, and approaches that accelerate delivery and improve DORA metrics and time-to-first-service.
• Provide architectural guidance for Data & AI platform patterns, including data modeling, streaming, analytics, AI/agent platform patterns, and evaluation/observability.
• Ensure reliability, security, and compliance by design, including public SLOs and error budgets, progressive delivery (canaries), chaos testing, multi-region disaster recovery, authN/authZ (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML; RBAC/ABAC), secure webhooks, and audit logging; embedding SOC 2/ISO 27001/GDPR considerations into designs and pipelines.
• Guide growth, monetization, and FinOps enablement through usage metering, entitlements, pricing tiers, quotas and rate limits; embed unit-economics telemetry (cost per call/event/tenant) to inform caching, capacity, storage tiers, and retention policies.
• Multiply architectural impact by running ADR/RFC processes, leading design reviews and guilds, mentoring Staff/Principal engineers, and prototyping to de-risk major bets and migrations.

Requirements

• 10+ years designing and operating data storage technology at scale in cloud-native SaaS environments (AWS/GCP, MySQL, relational databases, graph databases, NoSQL, caching, event systems, progressive delivery).

• Proven ownership of data movement through developer portals and partner onboarding/marketplaces; experience shipping versioning/deprecation programs and webhook/event architectures (REST/GraphQL; Kafka/PubSub or equivalents).

• Deep security and tenancy experience, including OAuth2/OIDC, scope design, RBAC/ABAC, multi-tenant isolation, auditing, privacy-preserving patterns, and compliance integrated into workflows.

• Reliability and observability fluency, including tracing, logs, metrics, SLO/error-budget culture, chaos/DR patterns, and secure webhook delivery.

• DevEx and efficiency impact with measurable DORA improvements, faster time-to-first-service, and improved unit economics/FinOps.

• What Will Make Us Really Love You

• You have transformed developer experience with measurable improvements to DORA metrics and internal satisfaction through intuitive platforms and golden paths.

• You inspire architectural clarity and alignment across teams, helping leadership and engineers rally around a cohesive technical vision.

• You cultivate thriving developer ecosystems—internally and externally—through SDKs, integrations, and marketplaces.

• You bring deep technical fluency in modern architectural patterns such as event-driven systems, GraphQL federation, and emerging data/AI platforms.

• You are a multiplier of talent: a coach, mentor, and community-builder who elevates architecture culture across the organization.

• You drive change through influence, balancing pragmatism with innovation and communicating complex ideas simply.