Principal Solutions Architect, Conduct

Financial institutions and regulated enterprises must detect misconduct across expanding digital channels, comply with evolving global regulations (FINRA, SEC, FCA, etc.), manage petabyte-scale data growth, and incorporate AI-driven supervision without compromising auditability or control.

Smarsh's Conduct platform addresses these challenges through compliant communications surveillance, investigation workflows, and AI-enhanced detection capabilities operating at global enterprise scale.

The Principal Solutions Architect, Conduct is a senior technical leadership role accountable for the architectural direction, integrity, and long-term evolution of the Conduct platform — a strategic growth engine for Smarsh.

This role differs from Service or Data Architects by focusing on holistic system-level concerns, cross-service consistency, and long-term platform evolution rather than domain-specific optimization.

The Principal Solutions Architect owns architecture across services, data, integrations, AI enablement, and platform capabilities, ensuring the system scales globally while meeting the rigor of highly regulated environments operating at multi-tenant, petabyte-scale data volumes.

This is a hands-on architecture role. The Principal Solutions Architect actively prototypes, participates in design and code reviews, troubleshoots real-world scalability and performance challenges, and refines systems to meet demanding customer non-functional requirements (performance, resilience, auditability, and cost efficiency).

How will you contribute?

• Architectural Direction & Platform Evolution
• Define and enforce a coherent architectural strategy aligned with product vision and long-term platform evolution.
• Make and defend high-impact design decisions with multi-year implications.
• Lead structural changes required to support scale, extensibility, new communication channels, and AI-enabled supervision capabilities.
Product & Cross-Functional Partnership
• Partner with Product Management to translate market and customer needs into durable architectural requirements.
• Align Engineering, Product, Compliance, and customer-facing leadership around architectural trade-offs and investment priorities.
• Negotiate effectively with demanding internal and external stakeholders.
Regulatory-Grade, Enterprise-Scale Design
• Architect resilient, secure-by-design, auditable systems capable of operating at petabyte-scale enterprise data volumes across global deployments.
• Translate regulatory and compliance requirements into concrete architectural patterns and controls.
AI Platform Enablement
• Establish governed integration patterns for AI services within Conduct workflows.
• Enable AI use cases such as:
• AI-assisted policy violation detection and behavioral signal analysis
• Investigator workflow acceleration (summarization, prioritization, case insights)
• Embed responsible AI principles — privacy, security, fairness, transparency, auditability, and explainability — into platform architecture.
• Ensure AI-enabled components meet standards for reliability, observability, cost control, and performance.
Hands-On Technical Leadership
• Prototype and validate architectural approaches.
• Conduct deep design reviews and trade-off analysis.
• Troubleshoot production-scale issues involving performance, scalability, and distributed systems behavior.
• Coach and mentor engineers to elevate architectural capability across teams.

What will you bring?

• Core Competencies
• Enterprise Platform Architecture: Proven ownership of architecture across business-critical, multi-service platforms, with direct contribution to design and delivery — not solely in an advisory or governance capacity.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong command of event-driven architectures, data-intensive systems, and large-scale ingestion and processing pipelines. Hands-on experience with Java, Kafka or equivalent event streaming technologies, and microservices design patterns.
• Cloud-Native Architecture: Experience designing and operating cloud-native systems on AWS (primary), Azure, or GCP, including compute, storage, networking, identity, and managed data services.
• Security & Compliance Mindset: Deep understanding of secure-by-design principles, encryption, IAM, data protection, and regulatory frameworks relevant to regulated industries.
• Architectural Judgment Under Constraint: Ability to make durable decisions in environments shaped by compliance requirements, legacy constraints, and delivery timelines.
• Exceptional Communication & Stakeholder Management: Influences without authority; articulates trade-offs clearly to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Platform Mindset: Optimizes for long-term system health, not short-term feature velocity.
Experience Profile
• 8+ years of progressive experience in software engineering and architecture, with demonstrated progression into senior technical leadership roles (e.g., Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Lead Architect embedded within a product engineering organization).
• Experience working embedded within a product engineering team, contributing directly to design, implementation, and delivery — not solely in an advisory or governance capacity.
• Experience owning architectural direction for large-scale, distributed, multi-service platforms serving enterprise customers.
• Demonstrated leadership in modernization, re-architecture, or structural platform evolution initiatives.
• Experience designing systems operating at enterprise data scale (petabyte scale or equivalent).
• Background in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments where auditability and risk materially influence system design — financial services, fintech, payments, or equivalent.
• Practical experience integrating AI/ML or LLM-based services into distributed systems