Chief Architect - Regulated Systems Healthcare & Payments - TechDome

The Job, Stated Plainly Somewhere in your org there's an architecture doc nobody's opened since the kickoff meeting. This role doesn't produce those. Techdome is hiring someone to own the technical spine of an 80+ engineer studio that builds systems handling real patient data and real money not staging data, not a demo environment. The architecture you design this quarter is the architecture you're paged about next quarter. You'll sit in the design review, write the PR that sets the pattern, run the incident retro when something breaks at 2am, and sit across the table from the client who's trusting your judgment over their own instinct. Same person, all four rooms. This isn't a diagramming job with an "architect" title bolted on. If what draws you to architecture is the leverage of being right and present not the authority of a title this is written for you. The Shape of the Work You own the platform, not a slice of it. Service boundaries, data models, API contracts, and the parts of the job nobody puts on a highlight reel encryption strategy, observability, cost curves, the scaling plan for eighteen months from now. All of it traces back to you. The compliance load is real, not theoretical. PHI moves through this system, which means audit logging, access control, tokenization, and encryption in transit and at rest aren't checkboxes they're the architecture. Payment data stays walled off with no exceptions, including the exception someone will eventually ask you to make under deadline pressure. The stack is MERN, end to end, with the infrastructure that keeps it alive in production. MongoDB, Express, React, Node plus containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and secrets management you've actually operated, not just specified in a doc. You make the trade-off calls and you own what happens after. Monolith or microservices, build or buy, synchronous or event-driven every one of these is a bet, and you're expected to defend it with evidence months later when someone asks why the system behaves the way it does. Your patterns outlast your projects. Code review standards, reference architectures, the default way this studio solves a recurring class of problem you're setting the baseline that other architects and tech leads inherit, whether or not they ever meet you. AI tooling is load-bearing here, not a novelty. Engineers across the studio ship daily with Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor. We're not looking for someone who's merely used these tools we want someone with a real point of view on how they change what "architecture" even means when a junior engineer can generate a service in an afternoon. You grow people without a reporting line to lean on. Senior engineers become tech leads here through the judgment you demonstrate and the trust you build, not through your position on an org chart. .