Staff Architect Jobs
Staff Architect jobs are open across technology, healthcare, financial services, and enterprise software, from senior engineer to principal and distinguished engineer levels, with specializations in cloud infrastructure, enterprise systems, and platform engineering. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
Find Staff Architect JobsLooking for remote work? View remote staff architect jobs →Overview
Showing 5 of 170+ Staff Architect jobs
Job Description
Zendesk is seeking an experienced Integration Architect or experienced engineer (Senior Staff Engineer) to lead the architecture and delivery of enterprise integration solutions across our internal services, enterprise applications and third-party SaaS environments. The ideal candidate will have a broad set of engineering skills across cloud infrastructure and application development; with deep expertise using AWS-native services including AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch and back-end programming languages such as Java, Python, and NodeJS to build secure, scalable, and highly reliable integration services.
The ideal candidate will also possess hands-on expertise constructing, real-time data streaming architectures and leveraging modern integration paradigms such as MCP and agent-to-agent frameworks. You will design and deploy end-to-end integration patterns that securely bridge corporate data assets and event streams with advanced AI systems to power scalable, intelligent enterprise applications.
The ability to learn, analyse, design and build integrations between internal systems, third-party SaaS environments and other suppliers is critical to this role. Prior experience designing integrations between CRM, Billing, Ordering, Entitlement, Usage and Financial systems is an added advantage.
This role will drive integration strategy, modernization initiatives, and cloud transformation programs and will bring strong software engineering fundamentals, experience solving complex integration challenges, and the ability to work collaboratively with architects, developers, business analysts, and application teams.
What You’ll Do
Solution Design & Delivery
- Conceptual to Enterprise Architecture: Design future visions for the expansion of integration architecture at Zendesk and be able to articulate both verbally and through documentation across a broad cross-section of stakeholders within the organization.
- Guide Delivery: Provide oversight, guidance and ensure implementation is aligned to the architecture and solution decisions that build towards the future vision. This is executed through the review and approval of system designs and PR reviews for code quality and extensible system level designs.
- Development: Build, test and deploy solutions for critical or high risk work as required.
- Manage Enterprise Risk: Identify potential change risks across integrations and systems and provide visibility and mitigation options for delivery.
Enterprise Integration & AI Connectivity Strategy
- Integration & Enterprise Action Layer: Formulate and execute the architecture strategy for the integration framework layer, enabling governed access to key business capabilities through APIs, events and agent protocols such as MCP and A2A.
- Platform Standards & Automation: Establish reusable components, API contracts, error-handling patterns, runtime standards, and AWS-based CI/CD automation pipelines.
- Governance & Controls: Define, publish, and execute governance standards and controls for integrations, establishing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), API/MCP/Event design reviews, and security frameworks tailored for AI interactions.
Next-Gen AI Protocols & Innovation
- Drive AI & Integration Innovations: Combine deep integration domain skills with emerging AI capabilities to evaluate, pilot, and drive adoption of novel protocols (MCP, A2A), agentic workflows, observability and error handling, and AI ecosystem standards.
- Hands-On Prototyping & PoCs: Build high-impact Proofs of Concept (PoCs) validating agentic integration patterns, context graph, and AI skills, directly accelerating implementation and removing technical debt.
Strategic Collaboration & Technical Leadership
- Internal Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Collaborate internally across Application teams, Data & AI streams, partnering with product owners, data engineers, enterprise architects, and business domain leads to align technical capabilities with business strategy.
- Adoption & Advocacy: Promote design-first and protocol-driven thinking, advocating for standardized Integration/AI tools and contextual integration across functional and product lines.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect end-to-end integration solutions across source, connectors, orchestration, transport, and target systems using domain-driven design and API-led approaches.
- Apply a multi-platform integration strategy (Workato, Fivetran ETL, streaming, AWS) to select the right solution based on business and technical needs.
- Create high-level and low-level technical designs leveraging AWS, Workato, FiveTran and related CRM and ERP technologies.
- Define and enforce non-functional requirements including scalability, resiliency, availability, and performance.
- Ensure solutions comply with IT governance frameworks (ITGC, SOX, HIPAA, DSCSA) and pass architecture review boards.
- Design event-driven, REST-based, and GraphQL-based integration architectures.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in integration architecture / engineering, integration solution development or enterprise integrations.
- 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience and leadership demonstrated across a broad set of cloud technologies and back-end programming languages.
- 5+ years building and handling data pipelines/ETL with Fivetran DBT or similar tools.
- Proven experience designing API-led and event-driven architectures.
- AWS Certifications for development and architecture.
- Hands-on expertise with at least one major integration platform (Workato, MuleSoft, Boomi, or equivalent).
Preferred Qualifications
- Workato platform experience building and maintaining recipes, connectors, error-monitoring systems, and AI Control plane (or comparable iPaaS platforms like Mulesoft or Boomi).
- Familiarity with AI-enabled integration or intelligent automation.
- Relevant certifications (Workato, Salesforce, Snowflake, architecture frameworks).
The US annualized base salary range for this position is $161,000.00-$241,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.
The intelligent heart of customer experience
Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.
Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.
As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.
Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.
Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.
Job Description
Zendesk is seeking an experienced Integration Architect or experienced engineer (Senior Staff Engineer) to lead the architecture and delivery of enterprise integration solutions across our internal services, enterprise applications and third-party SaaS environments. The ideal candidate will have a broad set of engineering skills across cloud infrastructure and application development; with deep expertise using AWS-native services including AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch and back-end programming languages such as Java, Python, and NodeJS to build secure, scalable, and highly reliable integration services.
The ideal candidate will also possess hands-on expertise constructing, real-time data streaming architectures and leveraging modern integration paradigms such as MCP and agent-to-agent frameworks. You will design and deploy end-to-end integration patterns that securely bridge corporate data assets and event streams with advanced AI systems to power scalable, intelligent enterprise applications.
The ability to learn, analyse, design and build integrations between internal systems, third-party SaaS environments and other suppliers is critical to this role. Prior experience designing integrations between CRM, Billing, Ordering, Entitlement, Usage and Financial systems is an added advantage.
This role will drive integration strategy, modernization initiatives, and cloud transformation programs and will bring strong software engineering fundamentals, experience solving complex integration challenges, and the ability to work collaboratively with architects, developers, business analysts, and application teams.
What You’ll Do
Solution Design & Delivery
- Conceptual to Enterprise Architecture: Design future visions for the expansion of integration architecture at Zendesk and be able to articulate both verbally and through documentation across a broad cross-section of stakeholders within the organization.
- Guide Delivery: Provide oversight, guidance and ensure implementation is aligned to the architecture and solution decisions that build towards the future vision. This is executed through the review and approval of system designs and PR reviews for code quality and extensible system level designs.
- Development: Build, test and deploy solutions for critical or high risk work as required.
- Manage Enterprise Risk: Identify potential change risks across integrations and systems and provide visibility and mitigation options for delivery.
Enterprise Integration & AI Connectivity Strategy
- Integration & Enterprise Action Layer: Formulate and execute the architecture strategy for the integration framework layer, enabling governed access to key business capabilities through APIs, events and agent protocols such as MCP and A2A.
- Platform Standards & Automation: Establish reusable components, API contracts, error-handling patterns, runtime standards, and AWS-based CI/CD automation pipelines.
- Governance & Controls: Define, publish, and execute governance standards and controls for integrations, establishing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), API/MCP/Event design reviews, and security frameworks tailored for AI interactions.
Next-Gen AI Protocols & Innovation
- Drive AI & Integration Innovations: Combine deep integration domain skills with emerging AI capabilities to evaluate, pilot, and drive adoption of novel protocols (MCP, A2A), agentic workflows, observability and error handling, and AI ecosystem standards.
- Hands-On Prototyping & PoCs: Build high-impact Proofs of Concept (PoCs) validating agentic integration patterns, context graph, and AI skills, directly accelerating implementation and removing technical debt.
Strategic Collaboration & Technical Leadership
- Internal Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Collaborate internally across Application teams, Data & AI streams, partnering with product owners, data engineers, enterprise architects, and business domain leads to align technical capabilities with business strategy.
- Adoption & Advocacy: Promote design-first and protocol-driven thinking, advocating for standardized Integration/AI tools and contextual integration across functional and product lines.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect end-to-end integration solutions across source, connectors, orchestration, transport, and target systems using domain-driven design and API-led approaches.
- Apply a multi-platform integration strategy (Workato, Fivetran ETL, streaming, AWS) to select the right solution based on business and technical needs.
- Create high-level and low-level technical designs leveraging AWS, Workato, FiveTran and related CRM and ERP technologies.
- Define and enforce non-functional requirements including scalability, resiliency, availability, and performance.
- Ensure solutions comply with IT governance frameworks (ITGC, SOX, HIPAA, DSCSA) and pass architecture review boards.
- Design event-driven, REST-based, and GraphQL-based integration architectures.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in integration architecture / engineering, integration solution development or enterprise integrations.
- 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience and leadership demonstrated across a broad set of cloud technologies and back-end programming languages.
- 5+ years building and handling data pipelines/ETL with Fivetran DBT or similar tools.
- Proven experience designing API-led and event-driven architectures.
- AWS Certifications for development and architecture.
- Hands-on expertise with at least one major integration platform (Workato, MuleSoft, Boomi, or equivalent).
Preferred Qualifications
- Workato platform experience building and maintaining recipes, connectors, error-monitoring systems, and AI Control plane (or comparable iPaaS platforms like Mulesoft or Boomi).
- Familiarity with AI-enabled integration or intelligent automation.
- Relevant certifications (Workato, Salesforce, Snowflake, architecture frameworks).
The US annualized base salary range for this position is $161,000.00-$241,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.
The intelligent heart of customer experience
Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.
Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.
As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.
Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.
Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.
Staff Architect Jobs by Experience Level
See All 170+ Staff Architect Jobs
Find roles that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Staff Architect JobsStaff Architect Job Market
Who's Hiring
- Northrop Grumman21
- CVS Health13
- Dell Technologies10
- Renesas7
- Lockheed Martin6
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Electronics & Hardware
- Construction & Real Estate
- Consulting & Professional Services
- Automotive
What Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in staff architect jobs.
- 8 or more years of software engineering experience with demonstrated architecture ownership
- Deep expertise in distributed systems design, including reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance
- Proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure at a production scale
- Experience writing architecture decision records and leading technical design reviews
- Ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across multiple teams
- Familiarity with security and compliance requirements relevant to the employer's industry domain
Tips for Your Staff Architect Job Search
Align your resume to system scale
Staff-level hiring committees look for evidence of decisions that affected large-scale systems, not just contributions to them. Quantify the scope of your architecture work: team size influenced, services owned, and the downstream impact of your technical choices.
Highlight cross-functional technical leadership
Staff architect roles expect you to drive alignment across engineering, product, and sometimes security or compliance. Your resume should show moments where you shaped a technical direction that multiple teams then built against, not just shipped code yourself.
Target companies by their current migration stage
Organizations mid-way through a cloud migration, platform consolidation, or microservices decomposition hire staff architects most urgently. Filter openings by companies that have recently announced infrastructure initiatives and tailor your cover letter to their specific transition.
Apply early to roles that fit
Migrate Mate lists staff architect openings from across the United States in one place, so you can find roles that match and apply directly to each listing.
Prepare a system design narrative for interviews
Staff architect interviews almost always include an open-ended system design round where you are expected to drive the conversation, resolve ambiguity, and defend tradeoffs. Practice walking through a past architecture decision you owned, including what you ruled out and why.
Negotiate scope before discussing compensation
At the staff level, role scope varies sharply between companies: some expect individual contributor depth, others expect org-wide technical strategy. Clarify reporting structure, decision authority, and how success is measured before entering any compensation conversation.
Staff Architect Jobs: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies are hiring the most staff architects?
Northrop Grumman, CVS Health, and Dell Technologies are hiring the most staff architects right now, with openings concentrated in California, Texas, and Georgia, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Demand is especially strong at companies scaling cloud infrastructure or undergoing platform modernization.
How many staff architect jobs are remote?
About 73% of staff architect openings are fully remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting the seniority and autonomy that comes with the role. Cloud infrastructure and platform engineering specializations tend to offer the highest share of remote arrangements, while roles requiring close collaboration with on-site hardware or regulated environments are more likely to require presence.
How do you become a staff architect?
Most staff architects get there by taking on progressively larger ownership at the senior engineer level, moving from feature delivery to system-wide technical decisions. Building a record of cross-team influence, writing architecture proposals that get adopted, and mentoring other engineers are the most direct signals that an organization looks for before promoting or hiring at this level.
Can I get hired as a staff architect without prior staff-level experience?
Some companies will hire you into a staff architect role from a strong senior engineer background if you can demonstrate the behaviors rather than just the title. Concrete evidence helps most: architecture documents you authored, technical initiatives you drove across teams, and systems you designed end-to-end. Smaller or faster-growing organizations tend to have more flexibility on title history than large established engineering orgs.
What does the staff architect interview process look like?
The process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical depth interviews covering distributed systems and your past architecture decisions, an open-ended system design session where you drive the design and handle ambiguity, and a cross-functional or leadership round assessing how you influence without direct authority. Some companies also include a written architecture exercise or ask you to review and critique an existing system design before the final round.
Where can I find and apply to staff architect jobs?
You can find and apply to staff architect jobs on Migrate Mate, which lists current openings from across the United States. Find roles that match your background and apply directly to each listing.
See All 170+ Staff Architect Jobs
Find roles that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Staff Architect Jobs