Chief Architect

Chief Architect

The Chief Architect is the final technical authority on software and firmware architecture decisions at Inovonics. You will work in close partnership with our Hardware Engineering leadership to ensure our full system architecture is coherent, scalable, and built to last. Your ownership includes end-to-end product architecture development, final architectural decision authority across software and firmware, system decomposition and interface definition between software, firmware, and hardware boundaries, technical roadmap for platform evolution, ensuring near-term product decisions do not compromise long-term architectural integrity, the standards and patterns the engineering teams build to, cross-functional collaboration spanning engineering and the business, partnering with technical leaders on system-level decisions at the HW/SW/FW boundary, and with product marketing, product management, and sales to ensure the architecture is grounded in real market and customer needs, not technical preference alone. Identification and mitigation of architectural risk, particularly in areas where system complexity creates product quality or certification exposure.

This is a role with real technical ownership, not an advisory seat. You will own the operating model for AI-accelerated architecture and development, the agent-ready specifications, decomposition, interfaces, and guardrails that direct feature architects and AI agents through design, build, and test, and the human-in-the-loop gates at which their output is approved. Your architecture is the control surface that feature architects and their agents build on. Product architectures for current and next-generation Inovonics products, clear component responsibilities and interfaces across the system, the key technical decisions, and the reasoning behind them, that set direction for the whole team, a clear path for how the architecture evolves in step with product strategy, the technical standards and patterns that give the hardware, firmware, and software teams a clear foundation to build on.

You are technically elite and practically grounded — you have built and shipped real, complex connected products spanning embedded firmware, cloud, and application software, and you carry the scar tissue of architectural decisions that played out over years. Four traits define you, and all four are non-negotiable. You are a builder. What you build is organizational as much as technical — stronger engineers, durable processes, and architectural practices that outlast any single project. You mentor and level up the people around you, establish the standards and review disciplines that make good architecture repeatable, and leave the teams more capable than you found them. You create followership. You lead through credibility, not title. Engineers follow your technical judgment because it has been earned. You can walk into a room of firmware and software engineers and command the respect of both — and leave them aligned, not merely outvoted. You are a learner. You hold strong opinions and defend them clearly, but you change your mind when the data warrants it. You interrogate your own designs, treat every field failure and design review as a chance to get sharper, and stay fluent as the technology moves. You direct people and agents. The people and agents you lead include feature architects — engineers who direct AI agents within their own subsystem — as well as the agents themselves. Directing that work is core to the job: you set the specifications, constraints, and review gates that turn human judgment and agent throughput into reliable, certifiable output, and you stay in the loop on the decisions that matter. You are energized by leading development at that leverage.

Essential duties and responsibilities include translating deliverable system requirements into a cohesive end-to-end architecture spanning hardware, firmware, software, and cloud, ensuring full traceability from requirement to design element. Define and document the overall system architecture, including component decomposition, interfaces, data flows, and technology stack selections. Allocate top-level system requirements to hardware, firmware, software, and cloud subsystems, and derive lower-level requirements for each domain. Direct execution across the NPI lifecycle — decompose the system into work that feature architects and AI agents carry out, own the requirements, interfaces, and constraints they operate under, and orchestrate parallel delivery across firmware, software, and cloud subsystems. Own the guardrails that keep AI-accelerated development inside the certifiable envelope — traceability, security, safety, and UL/FCC change control — and hold final approval authority at the human-in-the-loop gates where designs and code advance. Review and stand behind the architecture, design, and code produced by feature architects and AI agents alike, shifting architectural judgment toward verification and risk detection at the volume AI accelerates, and keeping change-failure, rework, and escaped-defect rates within target. Own the Technical Requirements Specification (TRS) as the authoritative, traceable definition of system and subsystem requirements across hardware, firmware, software, and cloud — ensuring it is complete, internally consistent, and approved before design proceeds. Author and maintain architecture requirement specifications, interface control documents (ICDs), and architecture description documents. Establish and enforce architectural standards, design patterns, coding conventions, and reference architectures across all engineering domains. Define hardware architecture requirements including compute, memory, power, thermal, connectivity, and physical/mechanical constraints. Specify firmware architecture requirements covering boot processes, real-time constraints, device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, and update/OTA mechanisms. Define software architecture requirements including application structure, APIs, middleware, data models, and third-party/open-source component strategy. Design cloud architecture requirements addressing scalability, availability, multi-tenancy, networking, storage, compute services, and cost optimization. Ensure architecture addresses non-functional requirements—performance, security, safety, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and regulatory compliance. Define system-wide security architecture, including threat modeling, authentication/authorization, encryption, secure boot, and data protection across all layers. Conduct architecture tradeoff studies and evaluate design alternatives, documenting rationale, risks, assumptions, and decisions (e.g., build vs. buy, cost vs. performance). Lead architecture and design reviews, verifying that domain designs conform to the system architecture and resolving cross-domain integration issues. Provide technical leadership and mentorship to hardware, firmware, software, and cloud engineering teams, ensuring architectural alignment throughout development. Manage architectural risk and technical debt, evolving the architecture across the product lifecycle to accommodate new requirements, technologies, and lessons learned. Comply with all company policies, procedures, and standards of conduct.

Experience & qualifications required include 15+ years of engineering experience, with a significant portion designing, implementing, and owning architectures for complex, highly integrated products spanning embedded firmware, cloud, and software — not just contributing to them. Demonstrated aptitude for directing AI-assisted or agentic development — the ability to specify work for engineers and agents, define the guardrails they operate within, and verify their output at scale. Deep prior agentic-delivery experience is rare and not required; the ability and appetite to lead development this way is. Deep fluency across the full embedded-to-cloud stack: RF protocols, firmware architecture, RTOS, hardware abstraction layers, the interface between embedded and cloud-connected systems, and all aspects of protected data security. Proven ability to command technical credibility with both firmware and software engineering teams Experience navigating the tradeoffs between architectural purity and practical product delivery constraints — including regulatory, certification, and manufacturing considerations Fluency in structured reliability and risk analysis — particularly Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) — applied at the system and architecture level to anticipate and design out failure modes before they reach the field Strong written and verbal communication; able to translate complex technical decisions into clear rationale for engineering and executive audiences Colorado-based or willing to relocate Strongly preferred experience in life safety, security, or medical product domains Familiarity with wireless protocols common to life safety and IoT environments (900 MHz mesh, Zigbee, Z-Wave, BLE, or similar), security protocols (CCMP, GCMP, AES, ECDH or similar), and security approvals (CAVP, CMVP, etc.). Background working at a larger company in a senior technical capacity, with a desire to step into broader ownership at a smaller, high-impact organization Familiarity with regulated product environments — UL, FCC, or similar — including change control and traceability requirements Physical demands & working conditions Work is performed in an office environment and requires the ability to operate standard office equipment and keyboards. Must have the ability to walk short distances. Some periods of time may be spent at customer sites for installation, testing, and troubleshooting.