Chief Architect

Location: Remote (USA)

Position Type: Full-time, Permanent

Work model: Remote (USA)

Industry: Commodities & Energy

About Us

Founded in 1995, Zema Global Data Corporation empowers organizations to simplify complexity, reduce risk, and make faster, more confident decisions that drive measurable results. Over the past two years, Zema Global has accelerated its growth through strategic investment and acquisition to strengthen our global leadership. Together we’re helping our customers gain a Decisioning Advantage – one bold idea at a time. With a presence across global energy, commodity, and financial markets, Zema Global empowers customers to simplify complexity, reduce risk, and make faster, more confident decisions that drive measurable results.

At Zema Global, we Think Big, Make It Happen, and Win as One. We thrive on collaboration, creativity, and respect, united by a shared drive to innovate and deliver meaningful impact for our customers and communities. If you’re inspired by solving complex challenges and contributing to a culture that values purpose and performance, we invite you to join us.

Position Overview

The Chief Architect is responsible for defining and governing the end-to-end technology architecture for the organization, with a focus on cloud-native platforms. This role sets the architectural vision, ensures alignment with business strategy, and leads the design of scalable, secure, and resilient systems that leverage modern cloud, data, and AI technologies. A key attribute of this role is the ability to work successfully with the senior product and technology leadership at Zema to ensure there is alignment on approaches taken and decisions made.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the enterprise architecture vision, principles, and roadmaps, with emphasis on cloud-native and AI-native capabilities.
• Lead the design of target-state architectures covering application, data, integration, security, and infrastructure domains.
• Establish reference architectures and patterns for cloud-native microservices, event-driven systems, and data-centric workloads.
• Partner with senior business and technology leaders to translate strategy into executable architecture initiatives and investment plans.
• Drive the modernization of legacy systems into cloud-native, API-first, and containerized services where possible.
• Understand FinOps practices-- embedding cost awareness into engineering and architectural decisions, work with Corp. IT and Finance to track costs in detail and make technical decisions that balance performance with efficiency across compute, storage, and data transfer.
• Provide architectural governance for major programs and projects, including design reviews, risk assessments, and decision-making on key technology choices.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers across product teams.; foster a strong architecture community and engineering culture.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and advise on their strategic fit.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, privacy, and security requirements in all architectures, particularly for data and AI usage.
• Define and maintain global reference architectures spanning multiple product lines and platforms.
• Design and guide distributed, multi-region systems supporting high availability and performance.
• Provide architectural guidance on cross-product initiatives, integrations, and shared services.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed privacy and regulatory requirements by design.
• Evaluate and guide adoption of shared technologies and platforms.
  
  

Required Qualifications

• 15 years of progressive experience in software architecture or solution architecture, product delivery and design experience including 15 years in a senior technology leadership or chief architect role.
• Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale cloud-native systems on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience designing and governing architectures across multiple products or platforms.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and APIs.
• Hands-on experience with mapping platform architectures to one or more cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience designing for scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, and performance.
• Solid understanding of security architecture and compliance-aware design.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to align diverse stakeholders. Strong ability to present complex information to executive / decision-making teams.
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architectures, including:
• Microservices, domain-driven design, API-first patterns
• Containers and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
• Event-driven and streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub)
• Experience in the application of AI to data platforms
• Some experience building generative AI applications (LLM-based services, retrieval-augmented generation, copilots, chatbots)
• Strong background in data architecture: data lakes/lakehouses, streaming pipelines, feature stores, data governance, and metadata management.
• Demonstrated ability to make pragmatic architecture decisions, balancing speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability.
• Excellent communication skills: able to articulate complex technical concepts to executives, business stakeholders, and engineering teams.
• Experience establishing and running architecture governance (design reviews, technology standards, reference implementations).
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in AI-native product strategy: identifying where AI creates differentiated value and shaping product roadmaps accordingly.
• Background in platform engineering and developer productivity (self-service
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid architectures and on-premises integrations.
• Familiarity with compliance and risk management for AI (model risk management, explainability, bias and fairness, data privacy).
• Prior leadership in highly scalable, high-availability systems (e.g., real-time analytics, trading, IoT, or similar high-volume domains).
• Experience working across multiple business domains or product portfolios.
• Background in data, analytics, or decision-support platforms.
• Experience in the application of AI to data platforms.
• Familiarity with architecture frameworks, e.g., TOGAF, Arc42, AWS Well-Architected or equivalent.
• Experience in advisory or consulting-style roles.
  
  

Why Zema Global?

• Be part of a rapidly growing company revolutionizing energy analytics, shaping how data drives decision-making across the energy and commodities markets.
• Work with cutting-edge technology alongside a team of industry experts who are redefining market intelligence.
• Significant opportunity to make a measurable impact on product strategy, revenue growth and customer success, with clear paths for career advancement.
• Join a company culture that values innovation, collaboration and customer-centric thinking, giving you the autonomy to drive meaningful change.
  
  

How to Apply?

• If you're excited about this opportunity, send us your application highlighting your qualifications and experience relevant to the role and we'll get back to you as soon as possible (we only accept CVs in English).
• We appreciate all applications, but only short-listed candidates will be contacted for further consideration. Thank you for your interest.
• And strictly no agency calls or agency CV submissions.
• No visa sponsorship can be provided*
  
  

Equality and Diversity: Zema Global is committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals and do not discriminate based on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other protected status.