Staff Engineer, Software Architect

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Production-Employee Asheville, NC, US

Artisan Studios, a leading digital innovation consultancy, crafts elegant digital solutions that accelerate success for our clients. We are a team of talented, compassionate, and inclusive professionals who share a passion for technology and an unwavering drive to grow. Our work spans from application and infrastructure modernization to cloud migration, AI engineering, and custom end-to-end product development.

We're looking for a
Staff Engineer to join our team of Artisans!

This is a senior individual contributor role. You lead through technical direction, standards, and your own work, not through direct reports.

You work across all teams and client engagements in the engineering organization. You set the technical bar, find risk early, and step in hands-on where a project needs you.

This role is designed to grow into the Director of Engineering role. As you grow, you take on more organizational leadership, including delivery health, engineering strategy, and people leadership.

Our engineers deliver with AI-assisted development under our Spec-Driven Development (SDD) playbook. You will show the organization how AI-assisted delivery is done well.

• Set technical direction across client engagements: review architectures, solution designs, and key technical decisions.
• Act as technical lead on the highest-risk engagements, and work hands-on when a project needs it.
• Own the Spec-Driven Development playbook and AI-assisted development standards. Show them in your own work, measure adoption, and improve them with the teams.
• Own engineering standards: code quality, testing (our engineers own testing for their own work), security, and architecture decision records.
• Find delivery and technical risk early across all engagements, and work with team leads to fix it.
• Lead the technical side of presales: scoping, solution architecture, estimates, statements of work, and client workshops.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for clients.
• Mentor team leads and senior engineers, and raise the technical bar of the full organization.
• Define the technical hiring bar and run senior technical interviews.
• Support security and compliance work in engineering, including SOC 2 controls and evidence.

You are a hands-on technical leader. Engineers follow your direction because of your judgment and your work, not your title. You give direct, honest feedback, and you measure results, not activity.

You are comfortable in a consulting setting. You can explain a technical risk to a client executive in the morning and pair with an engineer on the fix in the afternoon.

You use AI tools in your own work every day, and you know where AI output fails. You expect the same from the teams, and you know how to coach them to get there. You want to grow into organizational leadership.

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years as a senior engineer, tech lead, or architect across several teams.
• Experience setting technical direction for several teams without direct authority.
• Experience in a consulting or professional services company: solution architecture, estimates, statements of work, and client delivery.
• Strong hands-on background in cloud-native systems on AWS, in both architecture and code.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), and experience leading AI adoption in an engineering team.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and team leads. People management experience is a plus.
• Clear written and verbal…