Architect

Job description

Who we are At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to  hundreds of thousands of businesses  and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences. Our dedication to remote-first work , and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands. . Hiring and how we work We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions! Also, while we are a remote-first company, you may be asked to report in person on an ad-hoc basis for team gatherings, functional off-sites or customer meetings. . See yourself at Twilio Join the team as Twilio’s next Architect on our Data Substrate team About the job Twilio runs on data, and the platform underneath it is entering a major shift. Open table formats, the convergence of lakes and warehouses, tightening privacy regulation, and AI workloads are all changing what a data platform has to do. We’re hiring an Architect to set our direction through that shift and to make sure the systems we build over the next 3-5 years are the right ones. You’ll own the technical strategy for our data platform, spanning storage, lake and lakehouse architecture, catalog and governance, and privacy-by-design. You’ll work across org boundaries, setting standards that dozens of teams build on and raising the technical bar for the engineers around you. Responsibilities In this role, you’ll: • Own the architecture and multi-year technical strategy for the data platform, including the lake/lakehouse, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, and governance, and keep them coherent as one platform rather than separate systems. Define where each engine fits (for example, ClickHouse versus open table formats on object storage) and the migration path between them. • Make and document the major design decisions (ADRs, RFCs) on storage and open table formats, catalog strategy, compute engines, tenancy, data placement, and build-versus-adopt tradeoffs, with cost and performance at petabyte scale as explicit design constraints. • Set the reference architectures for how our core storage and query engines (ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, and lake engines) are deployed, tuned, scaled and operated as shared platforms, including capacity, cost, tenant isolation, and upgrade strategy. • Define the reliability model for the platform: availability targets, failure domains, disaster recovery, observability, and incident response patterns that teams can adopt. • Build privacy and compliance into the architecture, not onto it. Design deletion and right-to-erasure, retention, data residency, and PII classification so they work across the platform’s storage layers, backups, and derived datasets, including data that arrives from upstream streaming systems. • Drive data governance: classification, catalog and metadata, lineage, access control integrated with our authentication and authorization systems, data contracts, quality and integrity standards, and a catalog teams actually use. • Review designs and technical direction across the org, and act as the escalation point on hard distributed-systems and performance problems. • Mentor principal and senior engineers, and grow architectural judgmen