Chief Architect
Hybrid, Bucharest, Romania
JOB OVERVIEW
Legion Technologies is building the AI-powered operating system for the hourly workforce. We are hiring a Chief Architect to serve as Legion’s most senior hands-on technical leader and to shape the technical foundation that will power the next decade of product innovation.
This is not a strategy-only or advisory role. The Chief Architect must live close to the code, go deep with engineering teams, challenge assumptions, write and review technical designs, make high-consequence architecture decisions, and help turn bold product ambitions into scalable, reliable production systems.
This person will own architecture and technical decision-making for the most complex parts of Legion’s Workforce Management platform, including AI, optimization, forecasting, scheduling, distributed systems, data platforms, real-time decisioning, enterprise scalability, security, compliance, and developer productivity.
The ideal candidate has built and scaled mission-critical software used by large enterprise customers, has deep technical credibility with senior engineers, and can operate fluidly between code-level decisions and long-term platform strategy. They are pragmatic, decisive, opinionated, and comfortable making hard tradeoffs when simplicity, scalability, reliability, or customer trust require it.
This role reports to the Head of Product, Engineering, and Support. This is an open role currently being filled on an interim basis by the CEO.
RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES
Hands-On Architecture and Technical Decision-Making
- Serve as Legion’s senior-most hands-on technical authority for complex architecture, system design, and platform evolution.
- Personally dive into code, design documents, production incidents, performance bottlenecks, and implementation tradeoffs to diagnose root causes and guide technical direction.
- Lead the hardest technical decisions across AI systems, optimization engines, distributed systems, data architecture, reliability, scalability, security, and platform modernization.
- Write prototypes, reference implementations, architecture decision records, technical specifications, and design patterns where needed to unblock teams and establish clear direction.
- Make high-consequence technical decisions with incomplete information, balancing correctness, simplicity, speed, scalability, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability.
- Challenge architectural drift, unnecessary complexity, weak abstractions, and short-term decisions that create long-term platform risk.
- Partner directly with Staff, Principal, and senior engineering leaders in design reviews, code-level discussions, and implementation planning.
Platform Architecture and Technical Vision
- Define and own the long-term architecture for Legion’s AI-driven Workforce Management platform across application services, data infrastructure, ML systems, optimization engines, APIs, integration architecture, developer platforms, and enterprise-scale operations.
- Establish engineering-wide standards for system design, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, observability, security, and maintainability.
- Serve as the final architectural authority for major platform initiatives and technical decisions with long-term consequences.
- Identify opportunities to reduce complexity, improve system efficiency, accelerate engineering velocity, and unlock new product capabilities.
- Proactively surface technical debt, architectural risk, and platform constraints before they compound into customer, product, or engineering velocity issues.
- Create pragmatic migration paths from current-state architecture to target-state architecture while maintaining uptime, customer trust, backward compatibility, and delivery speed.
- Ensure Legion’s architecture supports enterprise configurability and extensibility without allowing uncontrolled customization or product fragmentation.
AI, Optimization, and Decision Systems
- Architect AI-native product capabilities across forecasting, scheduling, labor optimization, recommendations, copilots or agents, anomaly detection, decision automation, and other intelligent workforce management use cases.
- Define the architecture for production AI systems, including data pipelines, feature platforms, model training, model serving, retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.
- Make clear build-versus-buy decisions across LLMs, classical ML, optimization solvers, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, and internal AI platforms.
- Partner closely with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to turn mathematically complex labor optimization problems into reliable, scalable, explainable production systems.
- Establish standards for AI system quality, including accuracy, latency, cost, explainability, drift detection, reliability, customer-specific behavior, and production observability.
- Ensure Legion’s AI capabilities remain differentiated, defensible, enterprise-ready, and deeply integrated into operational workflows rather than bolted on as superficial features.
Distributed Systems, Data, and Enterprise Scale
- Drive architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS systems serving complex enterprise customers with high availability, performance, security, and compliance expectations.
- Lead technical decisions involving microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed data processing, real-time systems, data governance, and large-scale analytics.
- Improve the architecture for observability, incident analysis, performance engineering, capacity planning, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Use production data, incidents, escalations, and customer operational patterns as inputs into architecture and platform improvement.
- Ensure architectural decisions support global scale, data residency, enterprise integrations, configurability, extensibility, and long-term platform leverage.
Product, Business, and Customer Impact
- Connect technical decisions directly to customer value, product velocity, implementation speed, scalability, reliability, and long-term platform advantage.
- Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to translate ambitious product goals into executable architecture and technical roadmaps.
- Understand enterprise customer complexity and design systems that support real-world operational variability without creating unsustainable technical debt.
- Support strategic customer, partner, and vendor architecture discussions where deep technical credibility is required.
- Help evaluate technical implications of major product, partner, platform, and commercial decisions.
Engineering Culture and Technical Talent
- Mentor and elevate Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, architects, and senior engineering leaders across the organization.
- Raise the bar for technical judgment, system design, architecture reviews, documentation, code quality, operational discipline, and engineering craftsmanship.
- Help assess, attract, and develop senior technical talent, including Staff, Principal, and architect-level engineers.
- Build a culture of disciplined technical thinking, direct debate, clear decision-making, and pragmatic execution.
- Ensure architectural decisions are documented clearly, understood broadly, and translated into executable engineering plans.
Security, Compliance, and Enterprise Readiness
- Own the architectural approach to enterprise security, data governance, privacy, compliance, auditability, and resilience.
- Ensure architecture supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, data residency, access control, tenant isolation, regulatory requirements, and other needs of large global enterprise customers.
- Partner with Security, Infrastructure, Product, and Engineering teams to make security and compliance foundational architectural properties rather than after-the-fact controls.
REQUIRED SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS
Experience Level
- 15+ years of experience building and scaling large-scale software systems.
- Prior experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, Principal Architect, very senior Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
- Demonstrated success designing and scaling mission-critical, multi-tenant SaaS platforms for enterprise customers.
- Deep hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, data platforms, APIs, event-driven systems, platform engineering, and high-availability production environments.
- Proven ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader who can credibly engage in code-level and design-level discussions with senior engineers.
- Experience making major architecture decisions for systems with high scale, high reliability requirements, complex domain logic, and long product lifecycles.
- Experience modernizing large production systems incrementally while maintaining uptime, backward compatibility, customer trust, and engineering velocity.
- Experience building or supporting AI, ML, optimization, decisioning, forecasting, or data-intensive products in production.
- Strong understanding of observability, incident response, performance engineering, reliability architecture, capacity planning, and operational excellence.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineering teams, executives, customers, and cross-functional partners.
Technical Depth
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, cloud architecture, service-oriented or microservices architectures, APIs, event-driven systems, and large-scale data processing.
- Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Strong experience with modern engineering practices, including architecture reviews, design documents, code reviews, testing strategy, deployment architecture, observability, and production operations.
- Experience with languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Scala, or similar modern backend languages.
- Ability to reason deeply about tradeoffs involving performance, latency, throughput, cost, reliability, developer productivity, extensibility, and maintainability.
Leadership and Judgment
- Strong architectural judgment: knows when to simplify, when to re-platform, when to tolerate debt, and when to force a hard technical reset.
- Demonstrated ability to make bold technical decisions with incomplete information and drive alignment across senior technical and executive stakeholders.
- Ability to influence without relying on hierarchy, while still being willing to make clear decisions when consensus is insufficient.
- Strong product and business judgment; able to connect architecture decisions to customer outcomes, implementation speed, product differentiation, and company strategy.
- Pragmatic builder mindset: balances long-term architecture with startup speed, customer urgency, and execution realities.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS AND ATTRIBUTES
- Experience building platforms used by millions of users or supporting very large-scale enterprise operations.
- Experience at companies known for large-scale distributed systems, AI, cloud infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, workforce management, supply chain, fintech, commerce, logistics, or other complex operational domains.
- Familiarity with optimization engines, scheduling algorithms, forecasting systems, constraint solvers, real-time decision systems, or mathematically complex production systems.
- Experience architecting AI-native product capabilities, including LLM-enabled workflows, AI agents or copilots, model evaluation, retrieval systems, feedback loops, and production monitoring.
- Experience building internal developer platforms, platform infrastructure, data platforms, ML pipelines, or large-scale analytics systems.
- Experience designing highly configurable enterprise platforms without creating unbounded customization or implementation complexity.
- Experience participating in strategic customer architecture reviews or technical due diligence with large enterprise customers.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; PhD a plus but not required.
ABOUT LEGION
Join Legion's mission to turn hourly jobs into good jobs. We're a mission-driven team seeking exceptional talent to propel this vision. Embrace a culture that's collaborative, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial. With us, you'll grow your skills, work closely with experienced executives, and contribute significantly to our mission. Our award-winning AI-native workforce management platform is intelligent, automated, and employee-centric and proven to deliver 13x ROI. We help labor-intensive organizations maximize labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously. Legion has earned recognition for its innovation, including spots on the Inc. 5000 list, Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, and awards for our AI technology. Backed by leading investors such as Norwest Venture Partners, Stripes, First Round Capital, XYZ Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Workday Ventures, and NTT DOCOMO Ventures, we're making real change. If you're ready to make an impact and grow your career, Legion is where you belong. Join us in making hourly work rewarding and fulfilling.
BACKGROUND AND OPPORTUNITY
There are almost 75 million hourly workers in the United States, representing more than half of the entire workforce. Historically, managing hourly employees has been difficult due to high attrition (average of 60%) and high replacement costs (average of $3,200 per employee in retail). The ongoing labor shortage and competition from the gig economy, make it more difficult to attract and retain hourly employees. The top reasons hourly employees leave their jobs are a lack of schedule empowerment, poor communication with employers, and an inability to get paid early. Gen Z and the millennial workforce demand gig-like flexibility, modern technology, and compelling work options. Legion’s mission is to turn hourly jobs into good jobs, serving the hourly workers who make up the majority of the US workforce. We believe in empowering employees and helping employers be efficient and innovative by enabling intelligent automation powered by Legion’s Workforce Management platform to optimize labor efficiency and enhance the employee experience simultaneously.
Legion WFM was built for the cloud with AI at the core and is designed to handle the complexity of modern businesses and meet the needs of today’s hourly employees. Our team is composed of dedicated individuals from all backgrounds and experiences, globally distributed across all time zones. For more information, visit https://legion.co
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
At Legion, we offer competitive compensation and benefits packages to all employees. As a hybrid employer in Bucharest, Romania, pay for positions is determined using local, national, and industry-specific survey data. We strive to make competitive offers allowing employees room for future growth. Salaries will be based on the applicant’s location, level of experience, education, and specialized knowledge and skills. Additionally, we consider the external market rate, the amount we have budgeted internally, and internal equity within the company for the same position.
Benefits include, but are not limited to:
- Health Benefits
- Paid Time Off and Paid Holidays
- Equity
- Monthly Wellness Reimbursement
- Meal Vouchers
EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY
Legion Technologies is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, and any other legally protected status under federal, state, or local anti-discrimination laws.
DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION
For individuals with disabilities who need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email recruiting@legion.co
Legion is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, veteran, disability status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law.
How We Determine What We Pay
As a global employer, Legion determines pay for positions using local, national, and industry-specific survey data. We evaluate external equity and the cost of labor/prevailing wage index in the relative marketplace for jobs directly comparable to jobs within our company. Our posted salary range is based on national data and may be refined for a candidate's region/town/cost of living. For new hires, we strive to make competitive offers allowing the new employee room for future growth. Salaries will be based on the applicant’s location, level of experience, education, and specialized knowledge and skills. Additionally, we consider the external market rate, the amount we have budgeted internally, and internal equity within the company for the same position. An employee/candidate with a stronger skill set will receive higher pay.
Job Applicant Privacy Policy
This Job Applicant Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes how Legion Technologies, Inc. (“Legion”, “we”, “us” and “our”) collects, uses, and discloses “personal information” as defined under California law from and about job applicants who are residents of California.
This Policy does not apply to our handling of data gathered about you in your role as a user of our consumer-facing services. When you interact with us as in that role, the Legion Privacy Policy applies.
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Types of Personal Information We Handle
We collect, store, and use various types of personal information through the application and recruitment process. We collect such information either directly from you or (where applicable) from another person or entity, such as an employment agency or consultancy, background check provider, or other referral sources. This information includes:
- Identification and contact information, and related identifiers such as full name, date and place of birth, citizenship and permanent residence, home and business addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and such information about your beneficiaries or emergency contacts.
- Professional or employment-related information, including:
- Recruitment, employment, or engagement information such as application forms and information included in a resume, cover letter, or otherwise provided through any application or engagement process; and copies of identification documents, such as driver’s licenses, passports, and visas; and background screening results and references.
- Career information such as job titles; work history; work dates and work locations; information about skills, qualifications, experience, publications, speaking engagements, and preferences; and professional memberships
- Education Information such as institutions attended, degrees, certifications, training courses, publications, and transcript information.
- Legally protected classification information such as race, sex/gender, religious/ philosophical beliefs, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, marital status, military service, nationality, ethnicity, request for family care leave, political opinions, and criminal history.
- Other information such as any information you voluntarily choose to provide in connection with your job application.
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How We Use Personal Information
We collect, use, share, and store personal information from job applicants for our and our service providers’ business and operational purposes in the recruitment process such as: processing your application, tracking your application through the recruitment process, contacting references with your authorization, conducting background checks you authorize, and making hiring decisions. We will also use job applicant information for internal analysis purposes to understand the applicants who apply and to improve our recruitment process. We may sometimes need to use applicant information for legal purposes, such as in connection with any challenges made to our hiring decisions.
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With Whom We Share Personal Information
We will disclose job applicant personal information to the following types of entities or in the following circumstances (where applicable):
- Internally: to other Legion personnel involved in the recruiting and hiring process.
- Vendors: such as technology service providers, travel management providers, human resources suppliers, background check companies, and employment agencies or recruiters, where applicable.
- Legal Compliance: when required to do so by law, regulation, or court order or in response to a request for assistance by the police or other law enforcement agency.
- Litigation Purposes: to seek legal advice from our external lawyers or in connection with litigation with a third party.
- Business Transaction Purposes: in connection with the sale, purchase, or merger.
- How to Contact Us About this Policy – If you have any questions about this Policy, please contact privacy@legion.co.
