The Role Rival Insurance Technology is building Canada’s next-generation insurance platform, designed to scale safely in regulated environments and evolve quickly through automation and AI-native tooling. The architecture you shape will directly influence: Delivery speed and developer productivity Operational reliability in production Responsible integration of AI into regulated insurance workflows Successful modernization of legacy systems while building what’s next You will partner with Development, Platform, Product, Data/Data Science, and Security teams to set architectural direction, lead complex technical decisions, and ensure systems are designed to scale, integrate AI responsibly, and remain well-governed over time. Why This Role Matters This role enables Rival to move quickly without sacrificing stability or trust. It ensures that we make the appropriate trade-offs between technical design and market needs. The architecture you shape will directly influence delivery speed, operational reliability, and our ability to modernize legacy systems while building what’s next. This is a role for someone who enjoys making hard trade-offs, simplifying complexity, and creating architectures that teams can confidently build on. What You Will Do Architecture & System Design Define and evolve application and service architectures across distributed, cloud-native systems, including AI-enabled and automated workflows Review legacy applications and suggest ways to improve those applications as platform technologies evolve, as well as ways to reuse the logic in new services and applications. Design clear API contracts, support the data teams in their implementations and use of that data in the applications, and strategies that support both deterministic services and AI-assisted capabilities Lead architectural reviews and formalize decisions through ADRs and design documentation Guide teams through major refactors, platform migrations, and architectural inflection points Balance durability, scalability, performance, explainability, and cost with delivery speed AI-Native Architecture & Development Enablement Design AI-enabled systems as first-class architectural components, with clear boundaries between deterministic logic and probabilistic or AI-assisted behavior Define safe and pragmatic AI integration patterns, including orchestration, human-in-the-loop workflows, fallback strategies, and confidence thresholds Partner with engineering teams to re-engineer software development processes using AI-assisted tooling for: Legacy codebase understanding and extraction Refactoring and modernization Documentation, ADR creation, and system discovery Establish architectural guardrails for AI usage, including security, traceability, explainability, and risk management Make pragmatic decisions about where AI adds real value — and where it does not Platform Readiness & Reliability Ensure systems are designed with production-readiness as a first principle, including AI-adjacent services Embed resilience patterns such as health checks, graceful shutdowns, autoscaling, and fault tolerance Partner with Platform and DevOps teams on CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and runtime standards Ensure applications are instrumented with logs, metrics, and traces using OpenTelemetry or equivalent tooling Support safe deployment, monitoring and rollback patterns for AI-enabled features Evaluate architectural decisions through performance, reliability, and cloud-cost lenses Security, Compliance & Governance Embed security into application design, including authentication models, authorization, secrets management, and audit logging Design systems that protect sensitive data and support regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements Ensure architectures align with least-privilege and secure-by-default principles Partner with Product, Data, and AI teams to ensure AI-enabled components meet governance, traceability and validation expectations Participate in production incident reviews and post-mortems to drive systemic improvement Technical Leadership & Enablement Get hands-on with new technical design and code reviews Chair Rival's "Architecture Review Board" to vet the first use of designs and new technologies Influence technical direction across teams through mentorship, documentation, and clear decision-making Act as a trusted partner to Product, Development, Platform and DevOps leaders Explain complex architectural trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders Promote pragmatic, sustainable engineering practices that scale with the organization and support responsible AI adoption What You Bring Core Experience 7+ years building and operating backend systems in production environments Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale Strong background in .NET / C# and Microsoft Azure-hosted services Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, AKS or equivalent) Deep familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows Technical Strengths Strong API, data modeling and schema evolution skills Experience instrumenting applications with modern observability tooling Ability to reason about AI systems at an architectural level, including integration patterns, monitoring and risk management Experience modernizing or extracting logic from legacy systems using automation and structured refactoring approaches Comfort working within platform guardrails while influencing their evolution Experience supporting high-traffic, multi-tenant SaaS platforms Ways of Working Pragmatic and delivery-focused, with strong architectural judgment Calm under pressure and experienced navigating production incidents Curious, creative and comfortable challenging existing assumptions Able to influence across teams without formal authority, aligning technical stakeholders on architectural patterns, technologies and tools. Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making clear defensible technical decisions Nice to Have Experience in regulated environments such as insurance or financial services Exposure to event-driven architectures and messaging platforms Hands-on experience supporting AI-enabled systems in production Familiarity with cloud cost-optimization strategies TOGAF and/or Microsoft Azure Architect certifications #J-18808-Ljbffr