Distinguished Architect

About Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix (NASDAQ: SFIX) is redefining retail by combining human creativity with advanced data science and Generative AI. We believe in investing in our team as much as our technology to help redefine what's possible for our clients.

About the Role

Reporting to the Chief Product & Technology Officer, the Distinguished Architect will set the technical direction for Stitch Fix’s future platform and guide the architectural investments that make our products more resilient, scalable, efficient, secure, and adaptable. This is a senior technology leadership role for a builder and systems thinker who can connect business strategy, client experience, data and AI ambitions, and operational realities to a coherent technology evolution.

The Distinguished Architect will work across product engineering, data, platform, enterprise systems, security, and operations to establish clear architectural principles and make high-quality trade-offs. They will help Stitch Fix modernize legacy foundations while preserving the stability, reliability, and client trust that are essential to the business today.

Responsibilities

• Own and continuously evolve Stitch Fix’s enterprise technology architecture, defining target-state principles, platform capabilities, and modernization pathways.
• Translate strategic business priorities into architectural choices and investment roadmaps balancing speed to value with long-term scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to ensure new client-facing capabilities, internal tools, data products, and AI-enabled experiences are built on durable foundations.
• Lead architecture governance as an enabling mechanism: establish clear decision rights, lightweight review practices, reference architectures, and technical standards.
• Identify and prioritize systemic technology risks, including legacy constraints, single points of failure, resilience gaps, data and integration complexity, performance bottlenecks, and avoidable operating costs.
• Shape the multi-year investment strategy for platform modernization, cloud infrastructure, developer productivity, observability, data architecture, integration patterns, reliability engineering, and technical debt reduction.
• Set expectations for service reliability, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, observability, and operational readiness.
• Guide the design of data and AI foundations supporting trustworthy, scalable use of data and machine learning.
• Champion engineering efficiency through principled simplification, platform reuse, automation, and total cost of ownership management.
• Advise the CPTO and executive stakeholders on major technical decisions, investment trade-offs, vendor and build-versus-buy choices, and emerging technologies.
• Build and convene an architecture community across Stitch Fix, developing senior technical talent.
• Communicate technical strategy and architectural trade-offs in clear business terms.

Requirements

• Deep, hands-on technical leadership experience as a Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, VP of Architecture, or comparable role in a complex digital, e-commerce, marketplace, or consumer technology environment.
• A record of leading large-scale architecture modernization across distributed systems, cloud platforms, data ecosystems, integrations, and customer-facing applications.
• Expertise in designing resilient, scalable, secure, and observable systems, including reliability engineering, performance, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.
• Strong judgment on how to manage the tension between immediate product delivery and long-term platform health.
• Experience establishing architecture principles, technical standards, reference patterns, and governance practices.
• Fluency in modern cloud-native engineering, APIs and event-driven integration, data platforms, AI and machine-learning foundations, security, and developer productivity practices.
• Ability to assess technology investments through business value, risk, lifecycle cost, scalability, and organizational capability.
• Exceptional influence and communication skills across engineering, product, executive, and non-technical partners.
• A coaching-oriented leadership style that develops senior talent and raises the technical bar.
• A bias for pragmatic action, continuous improvement, and simple, durable solutions in complex environments.