Staff Architect II, Software Architecture (AI)

Location: Chicago, United States or London, United Kingdom

Annual salary: $164,500–$197,500 in Illinois, plus discretionary performance compensation.

Company

Bain & Company’s NextGen Software Solutions team builds and supports software products that power the firm’s work.

What you will do

• Provide technical leadership, architectural direction, and governance for internal and external teams developing, implementing, and deploying scalable software products.
• Participate in hands-on engineering, coding, formal code reviews, technical design, architecture documentation, and deployment activities.
• Guide architecture across multiple products, technology stacks, and engineering environments while managing scalability, maintainability, technical debt, and long-term quality.
• Influence vendor-led development and internal teams, challenge technical approaches, and drive alignment with engineering standards and delivery expectations.
• Lead technical discovery, proofs of concept, innovation workstreams, emerging technology research, knowledge sharing, and recruiting support.
• Guide responsible AI use across the software lifecycle, including AI-assisted development and AI-enabled and agentic system design.

Requirements

• Associate’s or bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• 8–10+ years of software or data architecture and engineering experience in a senior-level technology leadership role.
• Experience architecting, developing, and operationalizing highly scalable cloud-based B2B software products and services.
• Experience leading, mentoring, and growing multiple teams across products, services, or projects in a fast-paced Agile environment.
• Experience influencing internal and external engineering teams, guiding vendor-led development, and aligning technical standards, architecture, and delivery expectations.
• Experience owning and evolving software architecture over the long term while managing technical debt and sustainable engineering quality across multiple products and technology stacks.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted software development and AI-enabled architectures, including agentic systems and retrieval-augmented generation systems.
• Strong understanding of Python and agentic systems, including their architecture, development, and practical applications.
• Strong understanding of AI-enabled software development lifecycles, plus experience with several of .NET Core/C#, Java/Spring, Kubernetes/Docker, microservices, Node, React, Angular, Spark, Redshift, Kafka, AI/ML, NoSQL, OLAP, and OLTP relational databases.
• Strong communication, presentation, analytical, problem-solving, interpersonal, stakeholder-management, and documentation skills.
• Demonstrated Agile software development knowledge, strong prior software development performance, self-motivation, proactivity, results focus, and willingness to experiment.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent full-time employment within a supportive and inclusive environment.
• Annual discretionary performance bonus and possible additional discretionary compensation.
• 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, increasing after three years and fully vested upon start.
• 100% individual employee premiums for medical, dental, and vision programs.
• Paid time off, parental leave, sick leave, paid holidays, life and long-term disability insurance, and annual fitness reimbursement.