Chief Technical Architect, Engineering (IC Role)

Company Description

QAD is redefining manufacturing and supply chains through its intelligent, adaptive platform that connects people, processes, and data into a single System of Action. With three core pillars — Redzone (frontline empowerment), Adaptive Applications (the intelligent backbone), and Champion AI (Agentic AI for manufacturing) — QAD | Redzone helps manufacturers operate with Champion Pace, achieving measurable productivity, resilience, and growth in just 90 days.

QAD is committed to ensuring that every employee feels they work in an environment that values their contributions, respects their unique perspectives and provides opportunities for growth regardless of background. QAD's DEI program is driving higher levels of diversity, equity and inclusion so that employees can bring their whole self to work. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.

www.qad.com

Job Description

Ignite Your Future: Technical Leadership

Are you a senior architect who has shaped the technology direction of a large SaaS platform, and who is equally comfortable presenting a three-year technology plan to the CTO and reviewing a low-level design with engineers? Join QAD, where we are redefining the supply chain through a single System of Action that connects people, processes, and data.

As Technical Architect (Chief Architect level), you will own the architecture of our enterprise-scale SaaS platform and our Agentic AI initiatives. You will be the most senior technical voice across product pillars, setting the technical bar for the organization and influencing a large engineering community without needing a large reporting line. This is a deeply technical leadership role, not a people-management role.

The Mission: Defining the Platform's Future

You will set the technical north star for the platform, translate company strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap, and ensure architectural alignment across all product pillars. You will guide principal-level engineers, drive build-versus-buy decisions, and govern standards for cloud-native architectures, data platforms and AI systems. You will help the platform deliver on its core pillars:

• Adaptive Applications: The intelligent backbone powering the manufacturing enterprise.
• Champion AI: Agentic AI for manufacturing that drives measurable productivity and growth.

Your Impact: What You Will Be Doing

• Technology Vision & Long Range Planning: Define, communicate and drive the 3-5 year technology strategy and architecture roadmap for the platform or a significant product area, working directly with the CTO and product leadership.
• Platform Architecture at Scale: Architect multi-tenant, multi-region platform services with clear service boundaries, and set guardrails for reliability, performance, security and cost. Move teams from product silos toward shared, reusable platform capabilities.
• Agentic AI & Data Platform Architecture: Lead the architecture of the GenAI and agentic platform (LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector search, evaluation, observability, model governance) and the data foundations behind it (streaming, lakehouse, analytics).
• Architecture Governance & Risk: Establish and run architecture review forums, design standards and technical-debt prioritization. Identify and resolve systemic technical risks, performance bottlenecks and cross-team architectural conflicts.
• Build vs. Buy & Vendor Decisions: Lead technology evaluations, proofs of concept and commercial assessments across cloud, data, AI tooling and observability, with clear TCO and unit-economics reasoning.
• Clarifying Ambiguity: Turn nascent ideas into clear designs that teams can execute without rework, balancing customer needs, technical feasibility and organizational realities.
• Technical Leadership & Mentoring: Serve as the senior recognized technical expert in the organization. Mentor principal engineers and emerging architects and build the architecture leadership bench.
• Cross-Functional & Executive Alignment: Partner with Product VPs, QA, DevOps/SRE and engineering leadership to secure alignment. Convey complex technical trade-offs to executives, customers and partners and drive consensus.

Core Technical Foundations: What We Are Looking For

• Architectural Depth: Deep knowledge of cloud-native systems, distributed computing, microservices, event-driven architectures and modern data architectures (SQL/NoSQL, streaming, lakehouse), sufficient to make high-stakes, long-term decisions.
• Applied AI Experience: Hands-on experience designing production GenAI or agentic systems: LLM orchestration, RAG, vector databases, evaluation pipelines and AI observability.
• Hands-on Technical Credibility: Strong foundations in data structures and algorithms, OOP and modern engineering practices, with working fluency in Java, Python, Scala, Go or Node.js and a recent history of hands-on design and code reviews.
• System Governance & Security: Proven ability to establish governance for quality, performance, resilience, security and data privacy at enterprise scale.
• Measurable Outcomes: A track record of quantified impact: scale, uptime, latency, cost reduction or delivery-speed improvement.

The Mindset

• Strategic Thinker: Sees the big picture and the implications of technology choices, and can defend a position with data and sound judgment.
• Influencer Without Authority: Builds consensus across product and platform teams, mediates conflicts and moves large engineering groups in one direction.
• Adaptable & Innovative: Quickly assesses and adopts emerging technologies, particularly in AI, where they create competitive advantage.
• Proactive: Anticipates technical, organizational and business risks and needs without explicit direction.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• Degree: Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 5 years in an architect or principal-level role (for example Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Principal Engineer, Head of Architecture or equivalent) at a product company, ideally SaaS.
• Scope: Has owned architecture across multiple teams or platform areas and influenced 50+ engineers. Experience with platform consolidation, cloud migration or monolith-to-platform transformation is a strong plus.
• Preferred: Experience in ERP, supply chain or manufacturing software; patents or publications; conference talks or other external technical recognition.
• Location: This is an on-site opportunity based in Pune with 3-4 days work from the office. Only candidates willing to be based in Pune will be eligible.

Why QAD?

• Scope & Access: Own the technical direction of a platform and Agentic AI roadmap at the heart of a global manufacturing software company, with direct access to senior leadership.
• Structured Mentorship: Benefit from a structured program and training designed for rapid career development.
• Inclusive Culture: Join a collaborative and inclusive environment that champions learning, growth, and diverse perspectives.

Ready to step into the future of manufacturing? Apply now and start building a System of Action!

Additional Information

• Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
• An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set

About QAD:

QAD | Redzone is redefining manufacturing and supply chains through its intelligent, adaptive platform that connects people, processes, and data into a single System of Action. With three core pillars — Redzone (frontline empowerment), Adaptive Applications (the intelligent backbone), and Champion AI (Agentic AI for manufacturing) — QAD | Redzone helps manufacturers operate with Champion Pace, achieving measurable productivity, resilience, and growth in just 90 days.

QAD is committed to ensuring that every employee feels they work in an environment that values their contributions, respects their unique perspectives and provides opportunities for growth regardless of background. QAD’s DEI program is driving higher levels of diversity, equity and inclusion so that employees can bring their whole self to work.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.