Technical Director - Architecture

Your Opportunity:

Tenable is hiring a Technical Director of Architecture: a hands-on generalist who can take on any technical problem in the platform and carry it to a decision.

The scope is deliberately broad. You will move between data processing and streaming, platform infrastructure, CI/CD and release engineering, application architecture, and the security surfaces our customers depend on. Some weeks you will design a pipeline that has to hold trillions of events. Others you will be inside a product team's codebase untangling a consistency problem, or writing the prototype that settles whether an approach actually works.

You report to the Chief Architect and serve as a floating senior technical authority: the person teams call when a problem crosses ownership boundaries or has no obvious owner.

Your Role:

Architecture Across the Platform

• Own architectural direction for problems that span product lines: data models, service boundaries, integration patterns, and failure behavior.
• Work wherever the need is highest across data processing, platform infrastructure, delivery, application tiers, and security, and become productive in a new domain quickly.
• Maintain a rolling 6-12 month technical roadmap with a clear end state and discrete, deliverable phases.
• Identify systemic risk and accumulated technical debt, size the blast radius, and partner with Product Management to sequence the remediation.

Hands-On Engineering

• Write code, review code, and prototype. Debug production problems where the diagnosis is architectural.
• Review design documents and pull requests deeply enough to catch what everyone else missed.
• Build proof-of-concepts that test a hypothesis and settle debates with evidence.
• Set the standard for engineering rigor through your own work.

Reducing Complexity

• Simplify the technology surface: fewer competing choices, clearer guardrails, paved paths that teams actually take.
• Streamline development patterns to shorten time-to-first-change and reduce MTTR.
• Establish standards for how systems are designed, documented, and handed to operations.

Influence and Leadership

• Act as the final technical authority in your domain and own the call once it is made.
• Partner with Technical Leads, Product Owners, SRE, and Data Platform teams to keep architecture aligned to business objectives.
• Present options to leadership with honest trade-offs and a defensible recommendation.
• Mentor engineers at every career stage and raise the architectural judgment of the wider organization.
• Drive adoption of your own designs. An architecture nobody runs is a document.

AI-Augmented Engineering

• Use AI tooling as part of your daily practice: code generation, codebase comprehension, test generation, review, and investigation.
• Model the standard for the organization: where AI accelerates the work, where it misleads, and how to verify what it produces.
• Apply AI to architecture and operations problems, including pipeline analysis, incident triage, runbook automation, and capacity planning.
• Evaluate new tools and make pragmatic build-versus-buy-versus-adopt recommendations with a clear view of the risk.

How We'll Measure Success:

• Architectural clarity: decisions documented, roadmaps with clear phase gates, an end state people understand.
• Delivery impact: measurable improvement in lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR on the teams you have worked with.
• Simplification: fewer competing patterns, lower cost of change, and a faster ramp for new engineers.
• AI adoption: velocity and quality gains from AI-assisted engineering that hold up under measurement.
• Trusted partnerships: engineering, product, and SRE leaders seek you out early.
• Team growth: a visible lift in architectural judgment across the organization.

What You'll Need:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful depth in architecture at scale.
• Generalist range: you have shipped in more than one of services, data, infrastructure, or delivery, and you become productive in a new domain within weeks.
• Hands-on fluency: you can read an unfamiliar codebase and contribute to it, write a service or a Terraform module, debug a distributed failure, and review code with authority.
• Systems thinking: you reason naturally about failure modes, blast radius, and second-order effects.
• Strong written communication: you make a hard architectural problem legible to an engineer, a product manager, and an executive.
• Working fluency with AI-assisted development: you use these tools regularly, understand their failure modes, and can tell when their output is wrong.
• Comfort with ambiguity: you take an underspecified problem, define it, and drive it to a decision.

And Ideally:

• Depth in one area: data processing and streaming (Kafka, Spark, Flink), cloud platform and Kubernetes, or CI/CD and release engineering.
• Experience with cybersecurity or security product platforms.
• Platform engineering patterns: internal developer platforms, self-service infrastructure, golden paths.
• FinOps and cost optimization at scale.
• Public technical writing or open-source contributions.
• Experience moving an organization from legacy patterns to modern architecture.

If this sounds like the environment where you do your best work, we'd love to meet you.

Tenable is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) — through all applicable laws and regulations at the international, federal, state, and local levels.

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