Software Architect

About the Role

Abacus is scaling fast – more Data Solutions applications, more agent-assisted engineering, more complexity worth getting right. We’re creating this role to put a strong technical voice at the center of that growth: someone who can take sharp architectural judgment and turn it into standards the whole organization can build on with confidence.

We’re looking for an experienced Software Architect to help set the technical vision for how Abacus builds, secures, and scales its healthcare data platform & data applications platform. This is an individual-contributor role, not a management track – you’ll be the architecture guru and evangelist for our platform, translating business and customer needs into target-state architectures across data, applications, cloud, and agent-assisted engineering, and sharing your expertise with engineers and Solution Architects as you go.

We’re excited to meet architects at a range of career stages. Whether you’re a mid-level seasoned architect ready to step into broader scope, a senior architect with a track record of leading complex designs, or a principal-level leader who has shaped architecture across an organization, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll meet you where you are and shape the scope of the role to the level where you can make the biggest impact.

Our platform is built for health plans, and we’re especially excited to hear from architects who’ve worked with healthcare data.

You’ll build the reusable application foundation – application blueprints, integration contracts, and production-readiness gates – that lets Data Solutions applications move fast without reinventing the wheel every time, create re-usable assets. And as agent-driven development becomes a bigger part of how we ship, you’ll be the one turning architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that let AI-assisted output meet the same bar as our best human-written code – putting you at the center of how Abacus builds software for years to come.

You’ll bring enough depth to guide decisions across data, application, integration, cloud, and agentic development, while staying pragmatic about fit-for-purpose architecture and delivery constraints. You won’t do it alone – you’ll partner closely with Product Engineering, our Principal Engineers, AI Engineering, Security, and Client Solutions, bringing architecture to life from concept through production, not just on a whiteboard.

Your day to day

The scope of your work will scale with your level. Mid-level architects will contribute to and own defined areas of this work, while senior and principal architects will lead it across teams and the platform.

Core architecture leadership

• Own or contribute to the reference architecture for Abacus’s core platform – data ingestion, transformation, distribution, and serving – partnering with Principal Engineering where ingestion and distribution ownership is shared, and with Product Engineering on application and service layers.
• Define and apply architecture standards for scaling, high availability/disaster recovery design, serverless patterns, and multi-tenant SaaS architecture across our AWS and Azure environments.
• Design with HITRUST and GovRamp compliance in mind, partnering with Security and Compliance so designs meet audit and control expectations from the outset rather than as an afterthought.

Data applications and platform architecture

• Design scalable architectures for data solutions and their analytical and operational serving layers – in our world, spanning payer claims, membership, provider, clinical, lab, and pharmacy/Rx domains.
• Apply FHIR-based interoperability patterns and healthcare data standards where relevant to product or client implementations.
• Establish data contracts, lineage, quality controls, metadata, and integration patterns across ingestion, transformation, and serving layers, in coordination with Data Engineering.

Application architecture and standards

• Define standard user-management capabilities – tenant setup, roles, permissions, and admin experiences – as reusable patterns instead of something each team reinvents.
• Partner with UX/Design on front-end and design-system standards that keep our applications consistent and accessible.

Agent-driven development and AI-enabled engineering

• Translate approved architecture standards into skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that our ADD Harness and agent-assisted development workflows can consume directly.
• Evaluate agent-generated code and designs against architectural standards, and help build the scoring and review mechanisms that let us scale the quality of agent-produced merge requests across engineering teams.
• Partner with AI Engineering on semantic/context layers, agent interfaces (MCP and A2A), retrieval patterns, AI gateways, evaluation, traceability, and governed model access.

Architecture governance, knowledge sharing, and influence

• Be an active contributor to Abacus’s Architecture and Data Guilds – introducing ideas, taking them to realization, and helping drive a culture of innovation through hackathons and beyond.
• Share your expertise through pairing on designs, reviews, and pilots – and, as you grow in the role, mentor engineers and Solution Architects, building architectural capability across the team rather than concentrating it in one person.
• Help establish lightweight architecture review mechanisms that protect critical standards without slowing delivery, measuring adoption through signals like reuse, exception volume, and escaped design defects.

Production readiness and operability

• Ensure every architecture package includes deployment topology, support model, rollback strategy, and operational telemetry, partnering with DevOps/Platform and Security on CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability. Help to establish quality metrics like DORA.
• Hold your designs to a resiliency bar appropriate for a platform of Abacus’s scale, and help teams reason through trade-offs between delivery speed and operational risk.

The impact you’ll have

In your first 6–12 months, you’ll leave a clear mark on how Abacus builds software:

• Deliver or contribute to a reference architecture for Data Solutions applications that teams adopt from day one – a shared blueprint, API/data contracts, and starter implementations that let new work move faster instead of starting from scratch.
• Stand up the skills, rules, templates, and evaluation rubrics that let our ADD Harness and agent-assisted workflows produce work that meets our architectural bar – a foundation that scales with the team, not just with you.
• Build the architecture decision records, non-functional requirements, and operational-readiness checklists that give every release clear evidence it’s production-ready – deployment, observability, support, and rollback accounted for before go-live.
• Strengthen architecture capability across the team through pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing – leaving Abacus with stronger architectural judgment than it had when you started.

What you bring to the team

• Software engineering experience (typically 8+ years, with more depth expected at the senior and principal levels), including significant time in architecture roles designing and guiding complex cloud, data, integration, and application solutions from discovery through production operation.
• A full-stack engineering background – hands-on experience across services and APIs, data, and cloud infrastructure – that gives you the credibility to guide architecture end to end.
• A proven ability to establish standards – you’ve helped define architecture patterns and guardrails and gotten teams to adopt them through influence and collaboration. At the senior and principal levels, this extends to leading adoption across teams and mentoring others.
• Deep, hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), including containers and container orchestration (Kubernetes/K8s, Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, OpenShift, or comparable), Git-based CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability, and secure production operations.
• Continuously identify opportunities to convert custom implementations into reusable platform capabilities.
• Drive standardization without sacrificing business agility.
• Shape the long-term technical foundation while balancing immediate delivery needs.
• Strong experience with a modern data platform and distributed data processing (e.g., Databricks and Spark, or Snowflake) and with modern application and service architectures (API-first services, with exposure to Python), identity and authorization, and multi-tenant SaaS patterns.
• Working knowledge of agentic and AI-enabled engineering – LLM-enabled applications, MCP/A2A, LangGraph or comparable orchestration, AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., Cursor), Agent Driven Development and Harnesses, retrieval/context patterns, evaluation, and responsible AI controls.
• Excellent communication skills – able to align senior business and technical stakeholders, explain trade-offs, and produce clear architecture artifacts for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Direct experience building or maintaining reference architectures or developer platforms used by multiple teams.
• Experience defining architecture standards, rules, or evaluation rubrics for AI- or agent-assisted development workflows.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

What we’d like to see, but not required

• Healthcare data experience (a big plus): familiarity with healthcare payer, provider, clinical, and claims data, and with FHIR or other healthcare data exchange standards. It’s the area where you’ll ramp fastest here, and we’ll make sure you get up to speed on the rest.
• Transformation experience: you’ve been part of a digital transformation or cloud modernization effort – for example, moving legacy systems to cloud-native architectures or breaking apart monoliths – and can bring those lessons with you.
• Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• Front-end experience: React/TypeScript and design-system or UX standards work.
• Familiarity with HITRUST, GovRamp, or comparable compliance and control frameworks, and the ability to design for privacy, least privilege, auditability, and secure SDLC.

Compensation: Compensation for this role is based on experience, skills, and location, and includes base salary plus eligibility for performance bonuses and equity grants.

What you’ll get in return

• Unlimited paid time off – recharge when you need it
• Work from anywhere – flexibility to fit your life
• Comprehensive health coverage – multiple plan options to choose from
• Equity for every employee – share in our success
• Growth-focused environment – your development matters here