Charm Security-Software Architect - Engineering

Description:

Charm Security is building AI-powered defense systems that protect people from scams and social engineering attacks targeting financial institutions. Our platform combines real-time conversation analysis, behavioral science, and AI agents to break the scam spell before harm occurs.

Backed by Team8, we're deploying our technology with banks and financial services companies to protect their customers at the moment of risk. Our product suite includes a Prevention Agent for real-time customer protection, a Copilot for fraud analysts, and a Customer-Facing Agent for self-service fraud reporting.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll be their right hand on all technical decisions, driving architectural direction across the engineering organization. You'll lead by example—writing code, reviewing designs, and shipping features alongside the team while setting the technical direction for Charm's platform.

Your Role

You'll own the technical vision and architectural direction for Charm's platform, staying deeply hands-on while ensuring we build systems that scale with our growth and meet the stringent requirements of enterprise financial institutions. You will:

• Lead end-to-end design and implementation of complex cross-cutting features spanning multiple services (e.g., PII handling pipelines with multi-provider vault services, data classification, encryption at rest and in transit, GDPR compliance)
• Drive strategic technology decisions including build vs. buy evaluations (integration platforms, feature flag systems, queue infrastructure), vendor selection, and technology adoption
• Define and evolve our multi-cloud strategy, including customer-deployed architectures (Bring Your Own Cloud), data residency requirements, and hybrid deployment models
• Architect scalable, secure systems that meet enterprise compliance requirements (SOC2 Type II, ISO 27001) while maintaining development velocity
• Establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across the organization—from API design and event-driven architectures to observability and incident response
• Mentor senior engineers and collaborate with engineering managers to build a high-performing technical organization
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and AI Engineering to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps
• Represent Charm's technical capabilities to enterprise customers, participating in security reviews, architecture discussions, and RFP responses

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5 years in a technical leadership or architecture role
• Proven track record designing and delivering complex distributed systems in production
• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure) including Kubernetes, networking, and security
• Strong understanding of data security patterns: encryption, tokenization, key management (Cloud KMS, BYOK), and PII handling
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues (SQS, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub), and real-time data processing
• Ability to make pragmatic build vs. buy decisions balancing speed, cost, and long-term maintainability
• Experience working in regulated industries with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO 27001, financial services regulations)
• Excellent communication skills—able to explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Strong opinions, loosely held. Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and adjusting course as needed
• Hands-on mindset—you prefer to lead by writing code and shipping features, not just drawing diagrams
• Experience working closely with AI/ML and Data Science teams—deep understanding of how LLM-based teams operate, their tooling, experimentation workflows, and production deployment needs

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS platforms serving enterprise financial institutions
• Background in fraud prevention, cybersecurity, or financial services
• Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns and agent orchestration (LangChain, LangGraph, Vertex AI)
• Experience with single-tenancy and customer-deployed architectures
• Track record of successful technology migrations or platform modernization efforts
• Experience building and scaling engineering teams

What Success Looks Like

In your first 6 months, you'll have:

• Owned the architecture and delivery of at least one major cross-cutting initiative
• Established clear technical standards that improve consistency and quality across teams
• Built trust with engineering teams as the go-to person for complex technical decisions
• Contributed to winning enterprise deals through technical credibility and customer engagement