Chief Architect

Job Title Chief Architect Reports To VP of Engineering Compensation $180k-$240k Classification Exempt Location Colorado (On-Site / Hybrid) Level Director The Opportunity Inovonics has spent decades earning the trust of the life safety and security industry. Our wireless sensor networks and monitoring systems protect people - in hospitals, senior living communities, schools, and commercial buildings, and in some of the nation's most secure federal facilities - and that mission shapes everything we build. Our products depend on the seamless interaction of high-reliability RF hardware, embedded firmware, and cloud-connected software. Getting that integration right is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a product that works in the field and one that doesn't. If you have spent your career building complex connected products - where embedded firmware, cloud services, and application software all have to work as one - at a large company and have been waiting for the chance to own the architecture rather than contribute a piece of it, this role was designed for you. About Inovonics Inovonics is a leading developer of wireless sensing and communications technology for life safety and security applications. Our product portfolio includes: - High-reliability wireless sensor networks operating in the 900 MHz band, purpose-built for dense, interference-resistant environments - Wireless emergency-call and resident-safety solutions for senior living and assisted-living communities - Commercial security sensing platforms integrated with leading industry control panels and monitoring systems - Cloud-connected architecture enabling remote monitoring, diagnostics, and configuration across large installed bases Our systems are deployed in environments where failure is not an option. That standard drives our engineering culture and our commitment to getting the technical fundamentals right. What You Will Own The Chief Architect is the final technical authority on software and firmware architecture decisions at Inovonics. You will work in close partnership with our Hardware Engineering leadership - who bring deep domain expertise of their own - to ensure our full system architecture is coherent, scalable, and built to last. Your ownership includes: - End-to-end product architecture development - from concept through implementation, you are not advising on architecture, you are building it. That includes owning how feature architects and AI agents are directed through the delivery lifecycle, and accountability for the quality and certifiability of what they produce. - Final architectural decision authority across software and firmware - you set the direction and your judgment carries - System decomposition and interface definition between software, firmware, and hardware boundaries - Technical roadmap for platform evolution, ensuring near-term product decisions do not compromise long-term architectural integrity - The standards and patterns the engineering teams build to - set through the architecture you build, not dictated by a review board - Cross-functional collaboration spanning engineering and the business - partnering with technical leaders on system-level decisions at the HW/SW/FW boundary, and with product marketing, product management, and sales to ensure the architecture is grounded in real market and customer needs, not technical preference alone - Identification and mitigation of architectural risk, particularly in areas where system complexity creates product quality or certification exposure What You Will Build This is a role with real technical ownership, not an advisory seat. You will own: - The operating model for AI-accelerated architecture and development - the agent-ready specifications, decomposition, interfaces, and guardrails that direct feature architects and AI agents through design, build, and test, and the human-in-the-loop gates at which their output is approved. Your architecture is the control surface that feature architects and their agents build on. - Product architectures for current and next-generation Inovonics products - Clear component responsibilities and interfaces across the system - The key technical decisions, and the reasoning behind them, that set direction for the whole team - A clear path for how the architecture evolves in step with product strategy - The technical standards and patterns that give the hardware, firmware, and software teams a clear foundation to build on. You will also be deeply engaged in product development - drive design reviews, hands-on in critical technical problem-solving, and involved in the decisions that determine whether a product ships on time and performs in the field. Who You Are You are technically elite and practically grounded - you have built and shipped real, complex connected products spanning embedded firmware, cloud, and application software, and you carry the scar tissue of architectural decisions that played out over years. Four traits define you, and all four are non-negotiable. You are a builder. What you build is organizational as much as technical - stronger engineers, durable processes, and architectural practices that outlast any single project. You mentor and level up the people around you, establish the standards and review disciplines that make good architecture repeatable, and leave the teams more capable than you found them. You create followership. You lead through credibility, not title. Engineers follow your technical judgment because it has been earned. You can walk into a room of firmware and software engineers and command the respect of both - and leave them aligned, not merely outvoted. You are a learner. You hold strong opinions and defend them clearly, but you change your mind when the data warrants it. You interrogate your own designs, treat every field failure and design review as a chance to get sharper, and stay fluent as the technology moves. You direct people and agents. The people and agents you lead include feature architects - engineers who direct AI agents within their own subsystem - as well as the agents themselves. Directing that work is core to the job: you set the specifications, constraints, and review gates that turn human judgment and agent throughput into reliable, certifiable output, and you stay in the loop on the decisions that matter. You are energized by leading development at that leverage. Few people have years of agentic delivery behind them - you may not either - but you have the instinct to specify work well and the judgment to verify what comes back. You are done being a contributor inside a large organization where your impact is bounded by hierarchy and committee. You want to own something. This is that opportunity. Essential Duties and Responsibilities - Translate deliverable system requirements into a cohesive end-to-end architecture spanning hardware, firmware, software, and cloud, ensuring full traceability from requirement to design element. - Define and document the overall system architecture, including component decomposition, interfaces, data flows, and technology stack selections. - Allocate top-level system requirements to hardware, firmware, software, and cloud subsystems, and derive lower-level requirements for each domain. - Direct execution across the NPI lifecycle - decompose the system into work that feature architects and AI agents carry out, own the requirements, interfaces, and constraints they operate under, and orchestrate parallel delivery across firmware, software, and cloud subsystems. - Own the guardrails that keep AI-accelerated development inside the certifiable envelope - traceability, security, safety, and UL/FCC change control - and hold final approval authority at the human-in-the-loop gates where designs and code advance. - Review and stand behind the architecture, design, and code produced by feature architects and AI agents alike, shifting architectural judgment toward verification and risk detection at the volume AI accelerates, and keeping change-failure, rework, and escaped-defect rates within target. - Own the Technical Requirements Specification (TRS) as the authoritative, traceable definition of system and subsystem requirements across hardware, firmware, software, and cloud - ensuring it is complete, internally consistent, and approved before design proceeds. - Author and maintain architecture requirement specifications, interface control documents (ICDs), and architecture description documents. - Establish and enforce architectural standards, design patterns, coding conventions, and reference architectures across all engineering domains. - Define hardware architecture requirements including compute, memory, power, thermal, connectivity, and physical/mechanical constraints. - Specify firmware architecture requirements covering boot processes, real-time constraints, device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, and update/OTA mechanisms. - Define software architecture requirements including application structure, APIs, middleware, data models, and third-party/open-source component strategy. - Design cloud architecture requirements addressing scalability, availability, multi-tenancy, networking, storage, compute services, and cost optimization. - Ensure architecture addresses non-functional requirements-performance, security, safety, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and regulatory compliance. - Define system-wide security architecture, including threat modeling, authentication/authorization, encryption, secure boot, and data protection across all layers. - Conduct architecture tradeoff studies and evaluate design alternatives, documenting rationale, risks, assumptions, and decisions (e.g., build vs. buy, cost vs. performance). - Lead architecture and design reviews, verifying that domain designs conform to the system architecture and resolving cross-domain integration issues. - Provide technical leadership and mentorship to hardware,