Distinguished Architect

About the Role

Reporting to the Chief Product & Technology Officer, the Distinguished Architect will set the technical direction for Stitch Fix’s future platform and guide the architectural investments that make our products more resilient, scalable, efficient, secure, and adaptable. This is a senior technology leadership role for a builder and systems thinker who can connect business strategy, client experience, data and AI ambitions, and operational realities to a coherent technology evolution.

The Distinguished Architect will work across product engineering, data, platform, enterprise systems, security, and operations to establish clear architectural principles and make high-quality trade-offs. They will help Stitch Fix modernize legacy foundations while preserving the stability, reliability, and client trust that are essential to the business today.

Responsibilities:

•  Own and continuously evolve Stitch Fix’s enterprise technology architecture, defining the target-state principles, platform capabilities, and modernization pathways required to support the company’s business and product strategy.
• Translate strategic business priorities into architectural choices and investment roadmaps that balance speed to value with long-term scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to ensure new client-facing capabilities, internal tools, data products, and AI-enabled experiences are built on durable, reusable, and well-governed foundations.
• Lead architecture governance as an enabling mechanism: establish clear decision rights, lightweight review practices, reference architectures, and technical standards that accelerate teams rather than create unnecessary gates.
• Identify and prioritize systemic technology risks, including legacy constraints, single points of failure, resilience gaps, data and integration complexity, performance bottlenecks, security concerns, and avoidable operating cost.
• Shape the multi-year investment strategy for platform modernization, cloud infrastructure, developer productivity, observability, data architecture, integration patterns, reliability engineering, and technical debt reduction.
• Set expectations for service reliability, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, observability, and operational readiness; partner with engineering and security leaders to ensure these expectations are practical and measurable.
• Guide the design of data and AI foundations that support trustworthy, scalable use of data and machine learning across client experiences, merchandising, operations, and internal workflows.
• Champion engineering efficiency through principled simplification, platform reuse, automation, and architecture choices that reduce cognitive load, improve developer throughput, and manage total cost of ownership.
• Advise the CPTO and executive stakeholders on major technical decisions, investment trade-offs, vendor and build-versus-buy choices, and the risks or opportunities created by emerging technologies.
• Build and convene an influential architecture community across Stitch Fix, developing senior technical talent and creating shared ownership for high-quality technical decisions.
• Communicate technical strategy and architectural trade-offs in clear business terms so leaders can make informed decisions with confidence.

What Success Looks Like

• Stitch Fix has a clear, credible architecture strategy that connects technology investments to business outcomes, client value, and the company’s future growth.
• Product and engineering teams can move faster with reusable platforms, well-understood standards, simpler integration patterns, and fewer avoidable dependencies.
• The platform becomes more reliable, secure, observable, and scalable, reducing operational risk while protecting client trust.
• Modernization is managed as a focused investment portfolio with transparent trade-offs, measurable progress, and clear accountability rather than as unfunded or disconnected technical debt.
• Data and AI capabilities are built on foundations that are governed, accessible, safe, and designed for durable business value.
• Technology cost and engineering effort are directed toward the highest-value architectural investments, with less duplication, complexity, and reactive work.

About You

This is what you’ll need to succeed in this role from day 1. 

Requirements:

• Deep, hands-on technical leadership experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, VP of Architecture, or comparable role in a complex digital, e-commerce, marketplace, or consumer technology environment.
• A record of leading large-scale architecture modernization across distributed systems, cloud platforms, data ecosystems, integrations, and customer-facing applications.
• Expertise in designing resilient, scalable, secure, and observable systems, including reliability engineering, performance, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.
• Strong judgment on how to manage the tension between immediate product delivery and long-term platform health, with a demonstrated ability to make trade-offs explicit and actionable.
• Experience establishing architecture principles, technical standards, reference patterns, and governance practices that strengthen autonomy and execution rather than centralizing all decisions.
• Fluency in modern cloud-native engineering, APIs and event-driven integration, data platforms, AI and machine-learning foundations, security, and developer productivity practices.
• Ability to assess technology investments through business value, risk, lifecycle cost, scalability, and organizational capability, not solely technical elegance.
• Exceptional influence and communication skills, with the ability to earn trust from engineers, product leaders, executives, and non-technical business partners.
• A coaching-oriented leadership style that raises the technical bar, develops senior talent, and fosters constructive debate, curiosity, and accountability.
• A bias for pragmatic action, continuous improvement, and simple, durable solutions in environments with legacy complexity and evolving business needs.

You’ll love working at Stitch Fix  because you will…

• Fuse human creativity and styling expertise to redefine personalized retail.
• Set a high bar for our craft and drive measurable impact across fashion, tech, and data science.
• Actively leverage AI and modern tech to evolve how work gets done.
• Lead with innovation, think boldly, and aren't afraid to challenge conventional retail norms.
• Win together in a collaborative, low-ego environment where diverse perspectives are celebrated.
• Be client obsessed by putting our customers at the heart of every decision to deliver unmatched personalization and trust.
• Support our team with competitive compensation packages, comprehensive benefits, and meaningful career growth.