Technical Platform Architect

Technical Platform Architect   Location: Tampa, FL (Ybor City) on-site Department: Developer Experience Type: Full-time, individual contributor   About Ashley Ashley Furniture Industries Inc. is the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world. Established in 1945, Ashley offers one of the industry's broadest product assortments to retail partners in 123 countries. We're a privately held, family-owned business that offers great stability, a record of unparalleled success, and a company culture steeped in continuous improvement.

Due to our ambitious growth plans, we're always on the lookout for dynamic professionals to join our team. Our team works in a state-of-the-art office facility in the heart of historic Ybor City, surrounded by unique culture, architecture, and dining, just minutes from the Crosstown, I-4, and I-275.   About the role We are building an internal platform that serves every engineering team at Ashley thousands of repositories, dozens of Kubernetes clusters, and delivery teams spread across multiple business domains.

We are looking for a Technical Platform Architect to set the technical direction for that platform. This is a hands-on architecture role. You will write code, review pull requests and prototype the patterns you propose. We are not looking for someone to produce diagrams and hand them off we are looking for someone whose designs are credible because they have built them. It is also a role without direct authority.

You will not manage the teams who adopt your work. Your influence will come from making the recommended path measurably easier than the alternatives, from evidence, and from your ability to earn the trust of engineers who are free to ignore you. If you have moved a large organization by building something people chose to adopt, we want to talk to you. We care as much about how you hold what you know as about what you know.

You will arrive with a deep library of patterns, and we want you to bring all of it as a set of hypotheses about Ashley, not conclusions. What worked at your last company is real evidence and we will take it seriously, but our constraints, our teams, and our history are different, and the pattern must be tested here before it becomes an answer. The architects who struggle in this role are the ones who spend their first year rebuilding their previous platform.

The same applies to technology selection. We expect you to have strong preferences and to argue for them hard. We expect the argument to rest on our constraints and on observable outcomes rather than on familiarity, enthusiasm, or what is currently well-regarded. Being able to say "I was wrong, and here is what changed my mind" is a qualification for this role, not a liability.   What you'll do   Set technical direction Own the architecture of Ashley's internal developer platform the golden paths, reference implementations, and self-service capabilities that delivery teams build on Define and evolve enterprise standards for source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, observability, and deployment Evaluate emerging technologies against real constraints and make clear recommendations, including recommendations not to adopt Establish the architectural guardrails that let teams move quickly without producing systems the organization cannot operate   Build Design and implement reusable platform components that eliminate repeated effort across teams Prototype and prove out new patterns before recommending them broadly Contribute directly to platform codebases, automation, and tooling Make observability a property of the platform rather than a burden each team re-solves standardized OpenTelemetry instrumentation, consistent semantic conventions across services, and collector topologies that keep the telemetry backend a replaceable decision Ensure new and existing systems are resilient and operable by the teams that own them   Enable adoption Partner with deliver