Technical Platform Architect
Ashley Furniture is hiring a hands-on Technical Platform Architect in Tampa, FL (on-site) to set the technical direction of the internal developer platform serving all engineering teams — writing code, defining standards for CI/CD, IaC, Kubernetes, and observability, and driving adoption across Azure/AKS, GitHub Actions, Crossplane, ArgoCD, and OpenTelemetry.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Tampa, Florida, United States
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Architecture
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years designing and operating platform or infrastructure systems at enterprise scale
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical change across organizational boundaries without formal authority
- Habit of holding own experience loosely — able to test patterns against the organization's actual constraints and set them aside when they don't fit
- Evidence-based technology selection, including decisions made against own preference
- Deep, practical experience with Kubernetes and container-based delivery, including what breaks at scale
- Fluency in infrastructure as code and declarative, continuously reconciled infrastructure
- Strong experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, with a point of view on branching, artifact promotion, and release strategy
- Practical experience with OpenTelemetry — semantic conventions, collector architecture, auto-instrumentation, and cardinality/cost tradeoffs
- Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language (C# preferred) and at least one shell or scripting language (PowerShell preferred)
- Substantial experience with a major cloud provider (Azure preferred)
- Ability to design for non-functional requirements (availability, reliability, scalability, security, operability) and explain tradeoffs to engineers and executives
- Excellent written communication for asynchronous influence via documentation, design records, and code review
Nice to have
- Experience building or operating an internal developer portal
- Familiarity with platform engineering and Team Topologies concepts (platform-as-product, cognitive load)
- Experience with GitOps tooling and policy-as-code enforcement
- Background in developer experience or developer productivity work
- Experience in a large, multi-team, multi-org source control environment
- Experience introducing security and compliance controls into delivery pipelines in a way engineers accept
Full description
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.