Director, Enterprise Systems & Architecture

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $125M in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

Role Overview

Backblaze is seeking a Director, Enterprise Systems & Architecture to own the technical vision, architecture, and operations of the company’s enterprise systems and emerging AI use cases. This is a senior leadership role with organization-wide scope — spanning commercial and financial systems, GTM technology, data architecture, and the deployment and governance of AI agents across the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise systems architecture roadmap across the commercial, financial, and GTM technology stack, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, Snowflake, and related platforms.
• Own and maintain formal architecture documentation including system topology maps, data flow diagrams, integration inventories, and architecture decision records (ADRs).
• Establish and enforce architectural governance standards and review processes for all material system changes across the enterprise.
• Define reference architectures and design patterns for integrations, data exchange, platform extensibility, and AI agent workloads.
• Lead build vs. buy evaluations and establish platform selection criteria — including for AI tooling, agent orchestration frameworks, and LLMOps infrastructure — aligned with long-term architectural goals.
• Ensure systems architecture supports scalability, data integrity, security, and operational efficiency in a public-company environment.

Architecture Governance & Advisory

• Serve as the company's technical authority on enterprise systems design questions, providing architectural guidance to Revenue Operations, Finance, and Data Engineering leadership.
• Lead architecture review sessions and provide formal design approval for major system initiatives and platform changes.
• Produce and maintain architectural roadmaps, standards documentation, and technical decision frameworks that guide delivery teams and stakeholders.
• Translate complex business requirements into scalable, future-proof architectural solutions, ensuring alignment between business priorities and technical design decisions.
• Mature the infrastructure that governs AI agent workflows — ensuring all agents and automated systems operate through governed identity, API gateway, secrets management, logging, and reconciliation layers.
• Maintain and enforce change management standards for workflow deployments, prompt changes, and policy updates — including GitHub-backed version control and CI/CD deployment gates.
• Ensure AI agent operations comply with SOX IT General Controls, data privacy requirements (GDPR/CCPA), and internal data governance standards.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure in partnership with the security team for agent operations, including real-time dashboards, alerting on anomalous behavior, and audit trail evidence for SOX and compliance purposes.

Team Leadership & Vendor Governance

• Lead and develop a team of Business Systems administrators, contractors, providing mentorship and clear career development direction.
• Establish best practices for systems lifecycle management, change management, and project delivery.
• Manage vendor and contractor relationships, ensuring external resources operate within defined architectural standards and governance frameworks.
• Promote a culture of technical rigor, documentation discipline, and continuous improvement across the team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, Business Systems, or Platform Engineering roles, with demonstrated ownership of multi-system environments at a public or compliance-regulated company.
• Proven experience deploying, monitoring, and governing AI agents or LLM-powered workflows in production, including prompt versioning, agent identity management, and audit logging.
• Deep experience architecting and governing Salesforce CRM environments at scale, including data model design, integration patterns, and access controls.
• Strong working knowledge of NetSuite and Snowflake from both an architectural and operational perspective.
• Experience building and operating API gateway, secrets management, and identity-based access control infrastructure in support of automated workflows or agent systems.
• Solid understanding of SOX IT General Controls and application controls, with experience producing control evidence in a public company environment within the last 3 years.
• Proven track record managing multi-functional business systems or platform teams, including direct management of admins and techno-functional resources.
• Experience designing integration architectures using event-driven, API-first, or middleware patterns.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to engage credibly across technical teams, senior business leaders, and external auditors.
• Experience with workflow versioning, GitOps patterns, and CI/CD pipelines for business systems deployments.

Preferred

• Proficiency with architecture and security frameworks to enable the responsible usage of AI.
• Hands-on experience with iPaaS or middleware platforms (e.g., Fivetran, Polytomic, MuleSoft, Boomi, Celigo) at a design and governance level.
• Experience developing master data management (MDM) strategy and data governance frameworks.
• Experience managing analytics architecture and BI platforms such as Tableau.
• Salesforce and NetSuite certifications.
• Experience working in public or large enterprise technology environments with compliance and audit requirements.