Software and Integration Architect

Role overview

This role sits in Smarsh's Shared Services group and is responsible for the software and integration architecture that links the company's operational systems with its 12+ product platforms. It blends general-purpose software and cloud design with integration work, so the person needs solid system design ability across backend services, cloud infrastructure and applications that end users touch. They lead custom application development on Smarsh's internal IT platform, shipping tools for people across the business rather than only backend plumbing. Those systems provision every Smarsh product, meter and bill more than $120M a year in customer overage revenue, and carry telemetry across the estate. The architect also owns the entire integration landscape spanning IT and Operations; the only exclusion is integrations embedded in Smarsh's own products.

Smarsh describes the seat as hands-on and high impact. Expert AWS and software architecture skills come first: the architect leads the design and build of cloud-native, microservices-based systems and modern web applications, with integrations built mostly on AWS and MuleSoft and Python as the main language. Underpinning everything is an AI-native software development lifecycle (AI-SDLC) in which AI models and coding assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Ollama are part of how the team designs, builds, tests and ships. The architect is expected not only to work inside that method but to define and push it forward, working alongside a senior full-stack developer and an engineering manager.

What you will do

• Serve as the team's technical lead alongside the senior full-stack developer and engineering manager, steering projects from initial design through to delivery.
• Lead the architecture and build of custom applications on Smarsh's internal IT platform for users throughout the company.
• Own architecture, standards and delivery for every integration across IT and Operations, built mainly on AWS and MuleSoft with Python.
• Run the systems behind product provisioning, billing, telemetry, usage tracking and revenue capture across the Smarsh product ecosystem.
• Design cloud-native microservice architectures with well-defined service boundaries, scalable communication and fault tolerance, and personally write backend services and integration components in Python, AWS Lambda and MuleSoft.
• Guide the architecture of user-facing web applications so the team delivers fast, polished experiences on top of clean API contracts.
• Define and advance the AI-SDLC method: establish the patterns and guardrails that keep AI-assisted development safe and consistent, and build AI tooling for the team such as Claude plugins and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Own the cloud infrastructure lifecycle through infrastructure-as-code, and set CI/CD and release engineering practice with automated testing, safe deployments and rollback plans.
• Take the lead on observability and production readiness for every system, covering metrics, logs, traces, alerts and awareness of cloud spend.
• Convert architecture into well-scoped Jira epics, stories and tasks; guide technical prioritisation within Agile delivery; plan testing for distributed systems that covers integration, end-to-end flows, performance and failure modes; mentor the team and maintain architecture standards and governance.

What the employer is looking for

• At least 10 years in software and integration architecture, with real ownership of large, distributed systems.
• Expert-level AWS and software architecture background, with production systems built on services like Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS/DynamoDB, ECS/EKS, Step Functions and event-driven building blocks.
• Strong Python for services, automation and integration logic, and a genuine appetite for writing code every day.
• Experience designing and shipping modern web applications with a current front-end framework such as React, component-driven architecture, and responsive, accessible UIs over well-designed APIs.
• History of shipping production integrations both natively on AWS and on an enterprise iPaaS such as MuleSoft, with a clear view of how the two complement each other.
• Fluency with AI coding tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama and similar) inside an AI-first workflow, and a history of introducing new tooling that a team then adopts.
• Deep microservices knowledge covering how to decompose services, design their APIs, use asynchronous messaging, and build in resiliency and scale.
• Experience building secure, scalable APIs and integrations across REST, event-driven and batch styles, with strong grounding in authentication, authorisation and data protection.
• Hands-on IaC experience (Terraform, AWS CDK or CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines focused on deployment safety, observability tooling (CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and containers (Docker, ECS, EKS or Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with event streaming and messaging (Kafka, SNS/SQS, EventBridge); ability to break architecture into parallel Jira work for Scrum teams; strong communication skills across technical and business audiences and the autonomy to drive architecture decisions.

Good to have

• Experience with other object-oriented languages such as Java or C#.
• Prior work building Claude plugins or MCP servers.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification, at Associate or Professional level.
• MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect.
• Prior work in SaaS, platform-based or data-heavy environments.

Benefits and compensation

• Base salary of $165,000 to $185,000 per year.
• Fully remote role within the United States.
• Employer has received Best Places to Work awards from Comparably.com for its leadership, culture and people development.

About Smarsh

Smarsh helps organisations in regulated industries manage risk and extract intelligence from their digital communications. More than 6,500 organisations rely on it to detect compliance, legal and reputational issues across 80+ communication channels before they turn into fines or bad press. The company points to repeated leadership placements from analysts such as Gartner and Forrester, a place on the Inc. 5000 list every year since 2008, and a culture built on lifelong learning, collaboration and heavy use of AI/ML.