Job Description
Company Description
US – Seattle only: This position is open to candidates in the Seattle area. You will have a hybrid remote/in-office schedule where you will work from our casual, pet-friendly office at least 3 days a week.
Trupanion is a leading provider of medical insurance for cats and dogs in North America. Our mission is to help loving, responsible pet owners budget and care for their pets. At Trupanion, we offer a collaborative, casual, and pet-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to be themselves.
Job Description
The Enterprise Software Architect is accountable for defining, evolving, and communicating the enterprise’s target-state architecture and technology strategy. This role ensures that software systems, data, platforms, and integration patterns are designed to scale, remain secure, and enable long-term business agility. The Enterprise Architect connects business strategy to technical execution, balancing near-term delivery with long-term architectural health.
This role operates at the intersection of strategy, execution, and influence. Success requires deep technical credibility, strong business acumen, and the ability to guide senior technical leaders and executives toward sound, pragmatic technology decisions. This architecture role is a hands-on and strategic leadership position, accountable for defining the enterprise future state, ensuring positive business outcomes enabled by that future state, and holding accountability for ensuring implementation aligns with target-state architecture. In doing so, the Enterprise Software Architect demonstrates a clear preference to buy and integrate commercially available or partner-provided solutions over building bespoke systems, making build decisions intentionally and only where they create differentiated business value.
Key Outcomes & Impact
The Enterprise Software Architect will:
- Establish and maintain a cohesive enterprise architecture vision aligned with business objectives
- Reduce complexity and technical debt through intentional simplification and modernization
- Enable faster, safer delivery by providing clear standards, patterns, and guardrails
- Improve technology investment decisions through roadmaps, governance, and metrics
- Elevate architectural maturity across teams via mentorship, influence, and example
Responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture Strategy
- Define and continuously evolve enterprise target-state architectures across application, data, integration, infrastructure, and security domains
- Develop and maintain multi-year architecture roadmaps that balance innovation, cost, risk, and delivery velocity
- Translate business strategy into actionable architectural direction for product and platform teams
- Ensure architectural decisions prioritize simplicity, scalability, resilience, and security
- Leads the selection of new application, data, and infrastructure technologies and validates that selection aligns to target architecture and overall technology direction
Architecture Governance & Standards
- Establish, own, and evolve enterprise architecture standards, principles, patterns, and reference architectures
- Lead architecture reviews to ensure alignment with target-state direction while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy
- Partner with engineering leadership to ensure governance is enabling rather than blocking delivery
- Promote consistent adoption of standards while allowing for pragmatic, data-driven exceptions
- Document and evangelize utilization of AI technologies such as Codex, Claude, or other AI to to support Architectural practices
- Ensure usage of AI in support of architectural deliverables meets governance and compliance considerations
Solution Alignment & Delivery Enablement
- Collaborate closely with Solution Architects, Principal Engineers, and Engineering Teams to align designs with enterprise strategy
- Provide architectural guidance during initiative inception, major design decisions, and complex trade-off discussions
- Support teams in designing cloud-native, event-driven, and API-first solutions where appropriate
- Ensure architectural decisions consider operational excellence, observability, and supportability
Modernization & Technical Debt Reduction
- Assess legacy systems and define clear modernization and migration strategies
- Identify and prioritize opportunities to reduce architectural risk, duplication, and long-term cost
- Guide incremental modernization efforts that minimize disruption while advancing target-state goals
Technology Evaluation & Innovation
- Research and evaluate emerging technologies, platforms, and industry trends
- Provides oversight to ensure Enterprise Architecture practices are maintained and continuously improved
- Produce clear architecture decision records, whitepapers, and recommendations to support executive decision-making
- Ensure new technology adoption aligns with enterprise standards, skills, and long-term strategy
Communication & Influence
- Clearly communicate architectural intent, trade-offs, and decisions to technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership
- Champion the value of enterprise architecture as a business enabler, not just a technical function
- Facilitate alignment across teams, departments, and portfolios in a complex, fast-moving organization
- Communicates technology decisions and standards to the organization, driving understanding and appreciation for the value of architecture governance and standards
Metrics, Reporting & Continuous Improvement
- Define and track architecture health metrics (e.g., technical debt, standard adoption, system fitness)
- Measure and communicate the impact and value of enterprise architecture initiatives
- Continuously improve architecture practices, tooling, and ways of working
Leadership & Mentorship
- Mentor and coach Solution Architects and senior engineers
- Help grow architectural thinking across engineering teams
- Lead by example, modeling strong technical judgment, collaboration, and accountability
- Directly manage and develop a small team of architects (1–3 direct reports), setting clear expectations, providing feedback, and supporting career growth
Business Partnership & Strategic Support
- Partner with business and technology leaders to ensure architecture enables current and future needs
- Provide architectural insight for M&A, vendor selection, and major investment decisions
- Contribute to budgeting, forecasting, and cost optimization discussions for technology initiatives
What Success Looks Like
- Teams deliver faster and with greater confidence because architectural direction is clear
- Technology decisions align consistently with long-term enterprise goals
- Complexity and technical debt decrease over time
- Architecture is viewed as a strategic partner and trusted advisor across the organization
Qualifications
Skills & Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, systems design, or architecture roles
- 3+ years of experience operating at an enterprise or platform-wide architecture level
- Demonstrated experience defining target-state architectures and technology roadmaps
- Strong experience in cloud-based, distributed, and modern software architectures
- Experience working in agile and product-oriented delivery environments
- Proven ability to influence senior technical leaders and executives
- Experience modernizing complex, mission-critical systems
- Strong understanding of security, data architecture, and integration patterns
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive clarity in complex environments
- Pragmatic mindset focused on outcomes rather than theoretical perfection
Additional Information
Compensation:
- The base salary range for this position is $190,000 - $220,000, on a full-time schedule.
- Along with base compensation, Trupanion employees are currently eligible for monthly bonuses.
- We want all employees to be invested in Trupanion’s success, so we grant Restricted Stock Units to all new team members. Our new hire grants vest over 4 years.
Benefits and Perks:
- Full medical, dental, and vision benefits at no cost to the employee
- Four weeks of paid time off and 9 paid float holidays (you can decide which days are most important to you!)
- Five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
- Open, casual, pet-friendly, and fun office environment
- Free medical health insurance for your pet (1 dog or cat)
- Paid time off to volunteer at nonprofit organizations
- Seattle Office Amenities: Free on-site gym, free dog walking services for office pets during business hours, free parking, and paid ORCA cards.
For more information about Trupanion, visit https://trupanion.com/about
Learn more about how Trupanion has revolutionized our industry and the reimbursement model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdWZ4KHiPTQ
Trupanion is an equal-opportunity employer and embraces diversity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, abilities, perspectives, and skills.
We will ensure that individuals are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodations.
