Job Description

Ignite Your Future: Technical Leadership

Are you a senior architect who has shaped the technology direction of a large SaaS platform, and who is equally comfortable presenting a three-year technology plan to the CTO and reviewing a low-level design with engineers? Join QAD, where we are redefining the supply chain through a single System of Action that connects people, processes, and data.

As Technical Architect (Chief Architect level), you will own the architecture of our enterprise-scale SaaS platform and our Agentic AI initiatives. You will be the most senior technical voice across product pillars, setting the technical bar for the organization and influencing a large engineering community without needing a large reporting line. This is a deeply technical leadership role, not a people-management role.

The Mission: Defining the Platform's Future

You will set the technical north star for the platform, translate company strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap, and ensure architectural alignment across all product pillars. You will guide principal-level engineers, drive build-versus-buy decisions, and govern standards for cloud-native architectures, data platforms and AI systems. You will help the platform deliver on its core pillars:

- Adaptive Applications: The intelligent backbone powering the manufacturing enterprise.
- Champion AI: Agentic AI for manufacturing that drives measurable productivity and growth.

Your Impact: What You Will Be Doing

- Technology Vision & Long Range Planning: Define, communicate and drive the 3-5 year technology strategy and architecture roadmap for the platform or a significant product area, working directly with the CTO and product leadership.
- Platform Architecture at Scale: Architect multi-tenant, multi-region platform services with clear service boundaries, and set guardrails for reliability, performance, security and cost. Move teams from product silos toward shared, reusable platform capabilities.
- Agentic AI & Data Platform Architecture: Lead the architecture of the GenAI and agentic platform (LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector search, evaluation, observability, model governance) and the data foundations behind it (streaming, lakehouse, analytics).
- Architecture Governance & Risk: Establish and run architecture review forums, design standards and technical-debt prioritization. Identify and resolve systemic technical risks,



performance bottlenecks and cross-team architectural conflicts.
- Build vs. Buy & Vendor Decisions: Lead technology evaluations, proofs of concept and commercial assessments across cloud, data, AI tooling and observability, with clear TCO and unit-economics reasoning.
- Clarifying Ambiguity: Turn nascent ideas into clear designs that teams can execute without rework, balancing customer needs, technical feasibility and organizational realities.
- Technical Leadership & Mentoring: Serve as the senior recognized technical expert in the organization. Mentor principal engineers and emerging architects and build the architecture leadership bench.
- Cross-Functional & Executive Alignment: Partner with Product VPs, QA, Dev Ops/SRE and engineering leadership to secure alignment. Convey complex technical trade-offs to executives, customers and partners and drive consensus.

Core Technical Foundations: What We Are Looking For

- Architectural Depth: Deep knowledge of cloud-native systems, distributed computing, microservices, event-driven architectures and modern data architectures (SQL/NoSQL, streaming, lakehouse), sufficient to make high-stakes, long-term decisions.
- Applied AI Experience: Hands-on experience designing production GenAI or agentic systems: LLM orchestration, RAG, vector databases, evaluation pipelines and AI observability.
- Hands-on Technical Credibility: Strong foundations in data structures and algorithms, OOP and modern engineering practices, with working fluency in Java, Python, Scala, Go or and a recent history of hands-on design and code reviews.
- System Governance & Security: Proven ability to establish governance for quality, performance, resilience, security and data privacy at enterprise scale.
- Measurable Outcomes: A track record of quantified impact: scale, uptime, latency, cost reduction or delivery-speed improvement.

The Mindset

- Strategic Thinker: Sees the big picture and the implications of technology choices, and can defend a position with data and sound judgment.
- Influencer Without Authority:



Builds consensus across product and platform teams, mediates conflicts and moves large engineering groups in one direction.
- Adaptable & Innovative: Quickly assesses and adopts emerging technologies, particularly in AI, where they create competitive advantage.
- Proactive: Anticipates technical, organizational and business risks and needs without explicit direction.

Qualifications

Qualifications

- Degree: Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 5 years in an architect or principal-level role (for example Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Principal Engineer, Head of Architecture or equivalent) at a product company, ideally SaaS.
- Scope: Has owned architecture across multiple teams or platform areas and influenced 50+ engineers. Experience with platform consolidation, cloud migration or monolith-to-platform transformation is a strong plus.
- Preferred: Experience in ERP, supply chain or manufacturing software; patents or publications; conference talks or other external technical recognition.
- Location: This is an on-site opportunity based in Pune with 3-4 days work from the office. Only candidates willing to be based in Pune will be eligible.

Why QAD?

- Scope & Access: Own the technical direction of a platform and Agentic AI roadmap at the heart of a global manufacturing software company, with direct access to senior leadership.
- Structured Mentorship: Benefit from a structured program and training designed for rapid career development.
- Inclusive Culture: Join a collaborative and inclusive environment that champions learning, growth, and diverse perspectives.

Ready to step into the future of manufacturing? Apply now and start building a System of Action!

Additional Information

- Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
- Prospect to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
- Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
- An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
- Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set

📌 Chief Technical Architect, Engineering (IC Role) (India)
🏢 QAD
📍 India