Principal Software Architect

Do you want to empower organizations to build smarter compensation strategies while ensuring fair pay for all employees?

Syndio is a Series C technology company leveraging advanced technology and responsible AI to accelerate decision-making, streamline compliance, and democratize insights for consistent, equitable compensation practices at scale. Backed by $83M in investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Voyager Capital, and Emerson Collective, we are expanding our team and products to help companies align their rewards strategies with their business goals.

Our customers are our greatest asset. Syndio partners with many of the world's most recognized and respected enterprises, helping them implement leading-edge compensation solutions with expert guidance. We analyze pay for over 10 million employees across dozens of countries, ensuring fair, defensible rewards that drive better business outcomes.

Join us in our mission to help companies make smarter pay decisions they can trust

Syndio is redefining how compensation decisions are made — embedding intelligence, equity, and speed into every step. We are seeking a hands-on Technology & Product Architect to partner with our engineering teams on converging multiple product swimlanes into a cohesive, scalable, and AI-native platform that accelerates delivery of customer value.

This is a rare opportunity to shape the architecture of a product at the intersection of AI, compensation intelligence, and compliance, helping us transition from compliance-led to AI-native decision platforms. You will guide the journey from "here and now" pragmatic execution to a resilient and extensible long-term architecture. 

• Architect the convergence of disparate systems and swimlanes into a unified, composable powering AI-native platform.
• Guide technical integration of modern agentic patterns with existing systems, including monolithic legacy services and micro frontends.
• Lead design and application of graph-based data models and graph databases to power contextual, explainable, and interconnected compensation intelligence workflows.
• Serve as a bridge between present-day constraints and future-state goals, helping teams move fast today without sacrificing tomorrow.
• Work with Product leadership to anticipate roadmap needs and ensure platform capabilities scale with Syndio's product evolution.
• Lead cross-functional technical design reviews, aligning engineers, product, and design on implementation strategies that balance speed, scalability, and customer value.
• Help shape a headless architecture that powers flexible user experiences, including embeddable workflows across platforms like Slack, Teams, and HRIS tools.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership — pairing with teams, writing proofs of concept, and refactoring key components when needed.
• Model and promote a crawl-walk-run approach, enabling fast iteration and progressive investment in architecture and testing.
• Act as a technical steward and mentor, helping to raise the bar on architectural thinking, system design, and engineering maturity across the org.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives for product, customer success, sales, and leadership.
• Partner with security, data, and AI teams to ensure the platform is scalable, secure, and explainable.
• Define logging, observability, and auditability frameworks across agent workflows to meet EU AI Act and pay transparency compliance requirements.

• Proven track record building and scaling multi-tenant SaaS applications on major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including designing for elasticity, high availability, and global performance.
• Deep understanding of agentic systems, LLM integration patterns, and AI-native design principles.
• Practical experience designing and using graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, ArangoDB) in production environments — especially to model relationships between data entities for context-aware reasoning or recommendation systems.
• Hands-on experience with headless frontend architectures, including GraphQL, BFF patterns, and composable UI.
• Familiarity with legacy system integration, monolith decomposition, and pragmatic trade-offs.
• Experience building with AI development tools (e.g., Github Copilot, Cursor, etc.).
• Pragmatic problem solver who knows when to take risks and when to invest deeply — especially when navigating from MVP to scale.
• Background in API lifecycle management (design, governance, versioning, deprecation strategies).
• Familiarity with compensation, HR tech, or other highly regulated domains where explainability and compliance are critical.
• Track record of designing secure, privacy-preserving architectures that handle sensitive/PII data.
• Comfort building cross-functional alignment between product, data science, Engineering and platform teams in ambiguous environments.

How We Work

• We believe in start simple, soon — progress over perfection. We value architectural clarity and execution speed. You'll be joining a team that's small, ambitious, and committed to high trust and low ego collaboration. We empower engineers to make bold moves and back it up with a culture that supports learning through iteration.
• Applicants must currently reside within commuting distance of Seattle, WA or San Francisco, CA. Relocation is not currently offered.
  • Kindly note, employees must be eligible to work in the US indefinitely for any employer, as Syndio is NOT able to provide visa support or assistance.

• Competitive Compensation. For this role our base salary is targeted at $200-240k USD. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise. We take a geo neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location. 
•   Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio's success.
•   Flexible Vacation Policy. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to, plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave. 
• Paid parental leave
•   Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
•   Life Insurance & Disability. Syndio covers the full premium.
• 401(k). To help you save for your future
• Remote-first work model - #LI-Remote 

Role progression:

• In the First Month: You will focus on understanding Syndio's existing architecture, key product swimlanes, and immediate technical challenges, while beginning to build relationships with engineering and product leadership.
• In the Second Month: You will actively contribute to technical design reviews, propose initial architectural convergence strategies, and start providing hands-on technical mentorship by pairing with teams on critical path items.
• By the Third Month: You will lead the design and application of specific architectural initiatives, such as graph-based data models or headless frontend architectures, and begin mentoring engineers to raise the bar on architectural thinking across the organization.

The Interview Overview:

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for our Principal Software Architect position. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min phone call with a member of our Talent Team
• 45 min Zoom interview with the Hiring Manager
• 4 video interviews with several key members - 45 min each

At Syndio, we're building a diverse team that values candor, curiosity, and community. If you share these values and are interested in joining us, we'd love to talk with you even if you don't 100% meet the "about you" listed here. We don't expect anyone to have all the answers, as long as you're willing to learn and grow with us.

Syndio is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are building an inclusive and collaborative workplace as we grow, and we welcome team members regardless of gender/identity, sexual orientation, race or cultural background, religion, physical disability and age.