Technical Architect
This role is to be based near our office in New York City (hybrid).
About Us
We drive intelligent growth for ambitious businesses and leading brands. Customer understanding is more potent and drives greater value when insights go to work directly within marketing and experience priorities. To give our clients that advantage, we put an insights-driven operating system at the core of our design, go-to-market, and digital experience solutions. Material clients make smarter growth choices because they can see clearly how and when to take the shots that count. Together, we connect consumer intelligence with customer demand generation to build lasting, profitable relationships.
About the Role
Material is looking for a highly experienced Technical Architect to lead the technical evolution of a large-scale enterprise platform. This is a client-facing engineering leadership role combining enterprise architecture, platform modernization, production engineering, and technical leadership. The architect will operate in the EST time zone, partnering closely with client Product and Engineering leaders while providing architectural direction to globally distributed engineering teams. The role requires someone equally comfortable defining long-term architecture and debugging complex production issues.
Responsibilities
- Own target-state architecture and technology roadmap; define architecture standards, engineering guardrails and design principles
- Lead architecture reviews and approve solution designs; drive platform modernization initiatives
- Serve as the senior technical leader during EST business hours, partnering with client Product Managers and Engineering leadership on technical decisions
- Mentor architects and senior engineers; review critical code changes and remove technical blockers
- Provide architectural leadership for AWS Glue ETL pipelines, PostgreSQL, Snowflake and backend processing; investigate Glue job failures and guide implementation teams
- Lead cloud-native modernization across scalability, automation, observability, reliability and security
- Lead Sev-1/Sev-2 incident reviews and RCAs; drive engineering standards, reliability improvements and technical debt reduction
- Serve as primary engineering point of contact during EST hours; drive governance forums, roadmap discussions and technical alignment with client stakeholders
- Travel: 10–15% depending on client needs
Requirements
- 12+ years in software engineering with 5+ years as a Technical Architect or Principal Engineer
- Deep expertise in Java (8/11/17), Spring Boot, Spring Framework, REST APIs, Microservices and Distributed Systems
- Strong AWS experience including Glue, Lambda, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, EventBridge and SNS/SQS
- Proficiency across data platforms: AWS Glue, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, ETL, Data Modeling and Batch Processing
- Experience with DevOps tooling including Tomcat, JFrog, SonarQube, Splunk, OpenSearch, CI/CD and Git
- Background in large-scale data platforms and production-critical systems; client-facing consulting experience preferred
- Ability to balance strategic architecture with hands-on technical leadership; proven track record influencing senior stakeholders and mentoring engineering teams
Nice to Have
- Scala
- Kafka
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- AI-assisted Engineering
Benefits
Material employees join a peer group of exceptionally talented colleagues across the company, the country, and the world. We develop capabilities and leading-edge market offerings across seven global practices including strategy and insights, design, data & analytics, technology, and tracking.
A community focused on learning and making an impact. Material is an outcomes-focused company. We create experiences that matter, create new value, and make a difference in our clients’ lives and their customers’ lives.
Pay
Pay Range: $132,000.00 - $170,000.00. The range shown represents a grouping of relevant ranges currently in use at Material. Actual range for this position may differ, depending on location and specific skillset required for the work itself.