Autodesk is seeking a Senior Manager, Architecture to serve as the technical leadership anchor for our digital consulting platform. You will own the platform architecture and non-functional requirements, designing a system that serves implementation knowledge to both human users and AI-powered tools, with a focus on flexibility, governance, and trustworthiness. In the first year, the focus will be on delivering a reference architecture, technical roadmap, and establishing production readiness standards.
What You'll Do
- Own the end-to-end platform architecture: data models, API design, integration patterns, infrastructure strategy, and non-functional requirements
- Design knowledge representation and retrieval approaches that make consulting expertise trustworthy, versioned, and governable across its full lifecycle
- Design service layers that enable the platform to serve both human-facing applications and programmatic consumers
- Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions for platform capabilities
- Design integration approaches with Autodesk's broader platform ecosystem, including enterprise identity and emerging AI infrastructure
- Own platform architecture standards for security, data governance, and SOC2 compliance; partner with corporate security and infrastructure teams
- Define non-functional requirements and reliability standards for the platform; partner with operations teams on monitoring, alerting, and disaster recovery
- Establish architectural governance — design reviews, technical standards, and decision records — that enable engineering velocity
- Own the technical risk register and communicate architectural trade-offs clearly to leadership
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of approximately 6 architects and technical specialists while maintaining hands-on involvement in foundational architectural decisions
- Partner with product management to ensure technical architecture serves business goals, and with engineering to ensure designs are buildable and maintainable
- Collaborate with the Content & Knowledge team on knowledge data model and ingestion requirements
- Represent platform technical direction to stakeholders across Technical Advisory, IT, and Autodesk's platform engineering organization
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of experience in software architecture, platform engineering, or technical leadership with progressive responsibility
- Demonstrated experience designing and scaling cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS platforms from early stage through production
- Deep expertise in platform architecture: API design, event-driven systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Experience designing systems that store, govern, and serve structured or semi-structured content to multiple consumer types
- Strong understanding of security architecture and compliance frameworks (SOC2, data governance)
- Experience leading or managing teams of senior technical contributors while remaining hands-on
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
Nice to Have
- Has built platforms that integrate structured content, knowledge assets, or professional services workflows — with real attention to provenance, versioning, and lifecycle governance
- Has experience with AI/ML integration patterns — semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, or hybrid approaches — understands when and where these approaches create real value
- Has experience with data modeling for complex, semi-structured domains where the taxonomy evolves as the business learns
- Is comfortable operating as a hands-on technical leader who also manages people and builds team capability
- Has worked in or alongside professional services or consulting organizations and understands how technology supports human expertise delivery
- Brings a pragmatic engineering philosophy - the right approach for the problem, not a predetermined architectural dogma
Technical Stack
- AWS, Azure, or GCP
Team & Environment
You will lead a team of approximately 6 architects and technical specialists. This role reports to the Director of Platform & Productization within Global Delivery & Solutions.
Benefits & Compensation
- For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $120,100 and $215,380
Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
