Lead Architect

Cox Automotive's architecture group is reimagining the car-buying and service experience from inventory management, consumer shopping, service, and deal inception to close. The CAI Architecture Team architects and evolves the platforms that power inventory management, deal creation, validation, and service across the retail lifecycle.

The Lead Architect provides technical leadership for key Cox Automotive products, advancing platform modernization, solution architecture, and AI initiatives across CAI services.

What You'll Do

• Define and evolve the architectural vision, translating business priorities into durable technical direction across multiple delivery teams
• Drive solution design from discovery through delivery - shaping epics, validating assumptions, surfacing risks early, and aligning teams to target architecture
• Partner with engineering, product, and agile leaders to sequence and prioritize architectural investments, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health
• Identify and reduce technical debt in the deal initiation surface, including dependencies on legacy dealer workflow integrations
• Champion adoption of Cox Automotive's Common tenancy and user management platforms and AWS-native patterns within the value stream
• Identify and champion the use of generative AI within new products and features, aligning these to the Retail Agentic Platform capabilities and standards
• Produce and maintain architectural artifacts - roadmaps, decision records, solution diagrams, integration models - that give teams clear, actionable direction
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including Gen AI tooling, for applicability to deal initiation and structuring use cases

Who You Are: Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 6 years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and 4 years' experience; a Ph.D. and 1 years' experience; or 18 years' experience in a related field.
• Proven ability to align diverse stakeholders around technical direction, navigate ambiguity, and drive consensus across engineering, product, and business teams.
• Highly analytical and capable of diving technically deep to rapidly deliver proof-of-concepts and perform experimentation.
• Breadth of architectural knowledge spanning application, integration, and platform domains, with the ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Extensive technical experience in application architecture and API delivery at scale.

• Experience developing APIs at scale using GraphQL and/or REST.
• Experience in full development life cycle with significant experience delivering applications and architecture services in a production environment.
• Strong familiarity with architecting for and delivering solutions in a public cloud environment (AWS preferred).
• Hands-on experience with AI technologies and concepts (LLMs, autonomous agents, vector databases, model selection, agent-based architecture, data pipeline, AI-assisted PDLC, etc.)
• Experience working within DevOps cultures, with a focus on process improvement, automation, and continuous delivery.
• Strong proficiency with relational and non-relational database technologies (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, graph datastores, etc.), especially for information processing and exchange.
• Experience developing software in Python, Node.js, and other languages (Java, Scala, C#, etc.).

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven ability to identify and select appropriate application and data systems for varied workloads - integrations, processing, APIs, and operational reporting.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and async messaging patterns at consumer scale.
• Experience with API governance, API contract management, and establishing standards across engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive platform thinking - identifying reuse opportunities, reducing duplication, and shaping shared capabilities across delivery streams.
• Track record of enabling teams through influence without authority - mentoring engineers, shaping technical direction, and elevating architectural maturity across an organization.