Distinguished Architect, Platform

Join to apply for the Distinguished Architect, Platform role at BambooHR
.

Hybrid – This is a Utah-based hybrid position that will require regular in-office days each week. Employment with Bamboo

HR is contingent on passing both a background and credit check.

• Set platform vision & reference architectures for a resilient, secure, compliant, multi‑tenant SaaS: identity & permissions, tenancy, configuration, notifications, audit, and compliance guardrails.
• Architect and guide the evolution of our headless/API‑first platform: capability maps for domain APIs, events, and webhooks;
  OpenAPI/JSON Schema as sources of truth; contract testing; semantic versioning and clear deprecation windows.
• Architect and influence platform modernization: evolve Bamboo
  
  HR's core platform architecture—modernizing legacy systems, enabling scalable cloud‑native patterns, and ensuring the platform is positioned for future innovation and growth.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to define and communicate the product vision and strategy from an architectural perspective—representing the architectural vision and tradeoffs to the executive leadership team to ensure alignment across business, product, and technology.
• Own external developer experience:
  Developer Portal, interactive docs & explorer, quick starts, sandbox tenants, API keys & usage dashboards, change logs/status, language SDKs/CLIs/starter kits with automated releases, and partner onboarding (app registration, scopes/consent, security checks, marketplace publication, proactive change notices).
• Elevate how internal developers build on top of the platform: evolve the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to empower teams with standardized, self‑service developer workflows, standard SDKs/libraries, and self‑service tooling that accelerate delivery and improve DORA metrics and time‑to‑first‑service.
• Frontend & UX foundations:
  Partner with frontend architects to ensure the design system, accessibility standards, and frontend platform align with overall platform architecture principles and patterns.
• Provide architectural guidance for Data & AI platform patterns: guide data modeling, streaming, analytics, AI/agent platform patterns, and evaluation/observability.
• Ensure reliability, security & compliance by design: public SLOs and error budgets, progressive delivery (canaries), chaos testing, multi‑region DR; auth
  
  N/auth
  
  Z (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML; RBAC/ABAC), secure webhooks, audit logging; SOC 2/ISO 27001/GDPR baked into designs and pipelines.
• Guide growth, monetization & Fin Ops enablement: usage metering, entitlements, pricing tiers, quotas/rate limits; embed unit‑economics telemetry (cost per call/event/tenant) to guide caching, capacity, storage tiers, and retention policies.
• Multiply architectural impact: run ADR/RFC processes, lead design reviews & guilds, mentor Staff/Principal engineers, and prototype to de‑risk major bets and migrations.

• 10+ years designing and operating public APIs/platforms and IDPs at scale in cloud‑native SaaS (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes/containers, service mesh, IaC, progressive delivery).
• Proven ownership of developer portals, SDKs/CLIs, and partner onboarding/marketplaces; shipped versioning/deprecation programs and webhook/event architectures (REST/Graph
  
  QL; Kafka/Pub Sub or equivalents).
• Deep security & tenancy: OAuth2/OIDC, scope design, RBAC/ABAC, multi‑tenant isolation, auditing, privacy‑preserving patterns, and compliance baked into workflows.
• Reliability & observability fluency: tracing/logs/metrics, SLO/error‑budget culture, chaos/DR patterns, secure webhook delivery.
• Dev Ex & efficiency impact: measurable DORA improvements, faster time‑to‑first‑service, and improved unit economics/Fin Ops.

• You've transformed developer experience—measurably improving DORA metrics and internal satisfaction through intuitive platforms and golden paths.
• You've inspired architectural clarity and alignment across teams, helping leadership and engineers alike rally around a cohesive technical vision.
• You've cultivated thriving developer ecosystems—both internally and externally—through…