Technical Platform Architect

Job Description

Technical Platform Architect

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Location : Tampa, FL (Ybor City) on-site

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Department : Developer Experience

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Type : Full-time, individual contributor

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About Ashley

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Ashley Furniture Industries Inc. is the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world. Established in 1945, Ashley offers one of the industry's broadest product assortments to retail partners in 123 countries. We're a privately held, family-owned business that offers great stability, a record of unparalleled success, and a company culture steeped in continuous improvement. Due to our ambitious growth plans, we're always on the lookout for dynamic professionals to join our team.

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Our team works in a state-of-the-art office facility in the heart of historic Ybor City, surrounded by unique culture, architecture, and dining, just minutes from the Crosstown, I-4, and I-275.

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About the role

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We are building an internal platform that serves every engineering team at Ashley thousands of repositories, dozens of Kubernetes clusters, and delivery teams spread across multiple business domains. We are looking for a Technical Platform Architect to set the technical direction for that platform.

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This is a hands-on architecture role. You will write code, review pull requests and prototype the patterns you propose. We are not looking for someone to produce diagrams and hand them off we are looking for someone whose designs are credible because they have built them.

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It is also a role without direct authority. You will not manage the teams who adopt your work. Your influence will come from making the recommended path measurably easier than the alternatives, from evidence, and from your ability to earn the trust of engineers who are free to ignore you. If you have moved a large organization by building something people chose to adopt, we want to talk to you.

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We care as much about how you hold what you know as about what you know. You will arrive with a deep library of patterns, and we want you to bring all of it as a set of hypotheses about Ashley, not conclusions. What worked at your last company is real evidence and we will take it seriously, but our constraints, our teams, and our history are different, and the pattern must be tested here before it becomes an answer. The architects who struggle in this role are the ones who spend their first year rebuilding their previous platform.

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The same applies to technology selection. We expect you to have strong preferences and to argue for them hard. We expect the argument to rest on our constraints and on observable outcomes rather than on familiarity, enthusiasm, or what is currently well-regarded. Being able to say "I was wrong, and here is what changed my mind" is a qualification for this role, not a liability.

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What you'll do

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Set technical direction

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• Own the architecture of Ashley's internal developer platform the golden paths, reference implementations, and self-service capabilities that delivery teams build on
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• Define and evolve enterprise standards for source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, observability, and deployment
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• Evaluate emerging technologies against real constraints and make clear recommendations, including recommendations not to adopt
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• Establish the architectural guardrails that let teams move quickly without producing systems the organization cannot operate
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Build

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• Design and implement reusable platform components that eliminate repeated effort across teams
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• Prototype and prove out new patterns before recommending them broadly
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• Contribute directly to platform codebases, automation, and tooling
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• Make observability a property of the platform rather than a burden each team re-solves standardized OpenTelemetry instrumentation, consistent semantic conventions across services, and collector topologies that keep the telemetry backend a replaceable decision
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• Ensure new and existing systems are resilient and operable by the teams that own them
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Enable adoption

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• Partner with delivery teams to understand their friction and design capabilities that remove it
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• Publish patterns, standards, and reference material that teams can act on without a meeting
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• Mentor engineers across the organization and raise the level of platform fluency company-wide
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• Drive migration and modernization efforts through evidence and enablement rather than mandate
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Treat the platform as a product

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• Understand who your users are, what they are trying to accomplish, and where you are failing them
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• Measure adoption and developer experience, and use what you learn to prioritize
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• Make deliberate tradeoffs between capability, cognitive load, and the burden of operating what you ship
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What we're looking for

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• A bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
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• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years designing and operating platform or infrastructure systems at enterprise scale
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• Demonstrated ability to drive technical change across organizational boundaries without formal authority you can point to something an organization adopted because you made it the obvious choice
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• A habit of holding your own experience loosely — you can describe a pattern you brought into a new organization, tested against its actual constraints, and set aside because it didn't fit
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• Evidence-based technology selection you can walk us through a decision where you chose against your own preference, and describe specifically what moved you
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• Deep, practical experience with Kubernetes and container-based delivery, including what breaks at scale and why
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• Fluency in infrastructure as code and declarative, continuously reconciled infrastructure — you should be able to explain why reconciliation loops behave differently from run-to-completion provisioning, and when that difference matters
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• Strong experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, and a clear point of view on branching, artifact promotion, and release strategy
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• Practical experience with OpenTelemetry and a clear view of instrumentation as a platform concern rather than an application concern semantic conventions, collector architecture, auto-instrumentation, and the cardinality and cost tradeoffs that decide whether telemetry stays affordable at scale
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• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language (C# preferred) and at least one shell or scripting language (PowerShell preferred)
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• Substantial experience with a major cloud provider, Azure preferred
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• The ability to design for non-functional requirements availability, reliability, scalability, security, and operability and to explain the tradeoffs between them to both engineers and executives
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• Excellent written communication: much of your influence will be asynchronous, in documentation, design records, and code review
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Nice to have

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• Experience building or operating an internal developer portal
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• Familiarity with platform engineering and Team Topologies concepts, particularly platform-as-product and cognitive load as a design constraint
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• Experience with GitOps tooling and policy-as-code enforcement
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• Background in developer experience or developer productivity work
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• Experience in a large, multi-team, multi-org source control environment
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• Experience introducing security and compliance controls into delivery pipelines in a way engineers accept rather than route around
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Our current stack

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• Offered as context, not as a checklist. We care more about your judgment than your familiarity with any of these.
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• Azure and AKS, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, GitHub Actions with self-hosted runner scale sets, Kubernetes, Crossplane, ArgoCD, JFrog Artifactory, Microsoft Entra ID, and OpenTelemetry-based observability. We are actively migrating from earlier-generation tooling in several of these areas, and you will help decide where we go next.
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• Ashley Furniture is an equal opportunity employer and drug free working environment. While Ashley appreciates the interest of all candidates, only those candidates meeting specific job requirements may be interested. Principals Only
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