Software Architect (AI-Native Platform)

remote
Montreal, QC, Canada .
full-time . March 10, 2026

Description

The Role

Rival Insurance Technology is building Canada’s next-generation insurance platform, designed to scale safely in regulated environments and evolve quickly through automation and AI-native tooling. The architecture you shape will directly influence:

Delivery speed and developer productivity
Operational reliability in production
Responsible integration of AI into regulated insurance workflows
Successful modernization of legacy systems while building what’s next

You will partner with Development, Platform, Product, Data / Data Science, and Security teams to set architectural direction, lead complex technical decisions, and ensure systems are designed to scale, integrate AI responsibly, and remain well-governed over time.

Why This Role Matters

This role enables Rival to move quickly without sacrificing stability or trust. It ensures that we make the appropriate trade-offs between technical design and market needs. The architecture you shape will directly influence delivery speed, operational reliability, and our ability to modernize legacy systems while building what’s next.

This is a role for someone who enjoys making hard trade-offs, simplifying complexity, and creating architectures that teams can confidently build on.

What You Will Do

Architecture & System Design

Define and evolve application and service architectures across distributed, cloud-native systems, including AI-enabled and automated workflows
Review legacy applications and suggests ways to improve those applications as platform technologies evolve, as well as ways to reuse the logic in new services and applications.
Design clear API contracts, ,support the data teams in their implementations and use of that data in the applications, and strategies that support both deterministic services and AI-assisted capabilities
Lead architectural reviews and formalize decisions through ADRs and design documentation
Guide teams through major refactors, platform migrations, and architectural inflection points
Balance durability, scalability, performance, explainability, and cost with delivery speed

AI-Native Architecture & Development Enablement

Design AI-enabled systems as first-class architectural components, with clear boundaries between deterministic logic and probabilistic or AI-assisted behavior
Define safe and pragmatic AI integration patterns, including orchestration, human-in-the-loop workflows, fallback strategies, and confidence thresholds
Partner with engineering teams to re-engineer software development processes using AI-assisted tooling for:
Legacy codebase understanding and extraction
Refactoring and modernization
Documentation, ADR creation, and system discovery
Establish architectural guardrails for AI usage, including security, traceability, explainability, and risk management
Make pragmatic decisions about where AI adds real value — and where it does not

Platform Readiness & Reliability

Ensure systems are designed with production-readiness as a first principle, including AI-adjacent services
Embed resilience patterns such as health checks, graceful shutdowns, autoscaling, and fault tolerance
Partner with Platform and DevOps teams on CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and runtime standards
Ensure applications are instrumented with logs, metrics, and traces using OpenTelemetry or equivalent tooling
Support safe deployment, monitoring, and rollback patterns for AI-enabled features
Evaluate architectural decisions through performance, reliability, and cloud-cost lenses

Security, Compliance & Governance

Embed security into application design, including authentication models, authorization, secrets management, and audit logging
Design systems that protect sensitive data and support regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements
Ensure architectures align with least-privilege and secure-by-default principles
Partner with Product, Data, and AI teams to ensure AI-enabled components meet governance, traceability, and validation expectations
Participate in production incident reviews and post-mortems to drive systemic improvement

Technical Leadership & Enablement

Get hands-on with new technical design and code reviews.
Chair Rival’s “Architecture Review Board” to vet the first use of designs and new technologies.
Influence technical direction across teams through mentorship, documentation, and clear decision-making
Act as a trusted partner to Product, Development, Platform, and DevOps leaders
Explain complex architectural trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Promote pragmatic, sustainable engineering practices that scale with the organization and support responsible AI adoption

What You Bring

Core Experience

7+ years building and operating backend systems in production environments
Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale
Strong background in .NET / C# and Microsoft Azure-hosted services
Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, AKS, or equivalent)
Deep familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows

Technical Strengths

Strong API, data modeling, and schema evolution skills
Experience instrumenting applications with modern observability tooling
Ability to reason about AI systems at an architectural level, including integration patterns, monitoring, and risk management
Experience modernizing or extracting logic from legacy systems using automation and structured refactoring approaches
Comfort working within platform guardrails while influencing their evolution
Experience supporting high-traffic, multi-tenant SaaS platforms

Ways of Working

Pragmatic and delivery-focused, with strong architectural judgment
Calm under pressure and experienced navigating production incidents
Curious, creative, and comfortable challenging existing assumptions
Able to influence across teams without formal authority, aligning technical stakeholders on architectural patterns, technologies, and tools.
Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making clear, defensible technical decisions

Nice to Have

Experience in regulated environments such as insurance or financial services
Exposure to event-driven architectures and messaging platforms
Hands-on experience supporting AI-enabled systems in production
Familiarity with cloud cost-optimization strategies
TOGAF and/or Microsoft Azure Architect certifications

We are remote-first, Canada-based, and committed to building a culture where leaders are trusted to make real decisions and where teams work together to solve hard problems.

Rival Insurance Technology is committed to providing accessible employment practices. If you require accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please notify Human Resources at hr@rivalit.com.

Know someone who would be a perfect fit? Let them know!