Platform Architect

About the Role

As a platform architect, you'll be the senior individual contributor responsible for the platform's end-to-end coherence and cohesiveness. This is a hands-on technical authority role, not a management role: you'll lead through architecture, code, and documentation, and influence rather than through direct reports. Over time, we expect this person to become the technical anchor of a platform team.

Impact

• Unified platform architecture. You'll define the architectural patterns and shared foundations that enable the front end, back end, data pipelines, and AI agent layers to evolve together rather than diverge.

• Faster, safer delivery. Clear standards and reusable enablers reduce rework, shorten the path from idea to production, and make compliance and security the default.

• Connective tissue for financial interoperability. Arbital's core thesis is to connect fragmented healthcare data infrastructure to the financial decisions that VBC organizations need to make in a timely manner. Sound cross-layer architecture is what makes that promise real and reliable at scale.

• Raising the bar. You'll lift the architectural thinking of strong application, data, and AI engineers across the org, seeding the discipline that a future platform team will be built around.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture vision across the front end, back end, data pipelines, and AI agent harness, and keep the layers coherent as they grow

• Establish patterns, standards, and shared enablers (libraries, services, conventions) that break down silos and enable teams to build consistently

• Work hands-on alongside the front-end and back-end teams, contributing code, reviews, and design leadership

• Drive sound distributed systems and event-driven design where it fits, with reliability, observability, and security treated as first-class concerns

• Architect the AI agent harness to interact with PHI and other sensitive data in a governed, auditable, HIPAA-compliant manner

• Partner with data engineers, data scientists, and actuaries on our AWS and Databricks stack to align data pipeline architecture with the analytics and decision-support layers above it

• Work with Product Management to ensure that PRDs have sufficient detail to be translated into technical designs

• Produce clear, actionable architecture documentation that teams can confidently build from

• Rapidly understand existing codebases, surface technical debt, and chart pragmatic paths to pay it down

• Mentor engineers and data engineers toward stronger architectural thinking, building the foundation for a future platform team

Requirements

• 10+ years building and shipping production software, with a generalist, full-stack range

• A demonstrated track record of owning architecture across multiple layers of a system, not just within a single component

• Deep foundation in back-end and service development, plus enough front-end depth (modern frameworks) to lead and contribute there

• Strong distributed systems and event-driven architecture experience (e.g., Kafka or comparable)

• Experience architecting data pipelines, ideally on cloud data platforms; familiarity with Databricks/Spark is a plus

• Security and observability are treated as design fundamentals, not bolt-ons

• Excellent written communication — the ability to turn complexity into documentation that teams can act on

• A history of mentoring engineers and driving cross-team initiatives end-to-end through influence rather than authority

• A pragmatic, execution-grounded approach to architecture

• Experience with healthcare or other regulated data environments (HIPAA, PHI)

• Domain knowledge in value-based care, payer, actuarial, or claims data