Software Architect in Vancouver

At Autodesk, we are pioneers in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, building tools that empower some of the most creative minds on the planet to solve real-world problems. Recognized by Fortune, Forbes, Glassdoor and others as a top place to work, we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace where innovation and creativity thrive.

Autodesk's Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Data organization is seeking an experienced Software Architect to join the AEC Data team and define the cloud-native services and distributed-systems architecture that power the AEC Data Model (AECDM) and the many services around it. Data is the domain, but the role is fundamentally one of cloud and services architecture — APIs, service contracts, integrations, distributed-systems design, and the connected data model that ties them together — spanning multiple teams. It is not a data-warehouse or analytics-specialist role.

The AEC Data organization is building the foundational data infrastructure behind Autodesk's vision for connected construction: the platforms, services, and unified data models that span the entire built-asset lifecycle, from design and construction through operation and maintenance. This work enables the continuous flow of AEC data (3D models, 2D drawings, issue tracking, cost, sensor streams, and more) across Autodesk products and third-party integrations. The architect will help shape the next generation of capabilities for the Autodesk Forma Industry Cloud, collaborating with software architects, domain experts, and product teams across Revit, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, Autodesk Construction Cloud, and Autodesk Forma.

This is a senior individual-contributor role on an established architecture track, reporting to the Distinguished Architect of the AEC Data team, who also serves as the Lead Software Architect. The primary responsibility is to shape how multiple teams design and build — through standards, reference architectures, ADRs, and design-review governance — rather than to own a single service. The exact focus flexes to the candidate's strengths and organizational need.

Responsibilities

• API Design & Evolution: Design and evolve API surfaces across the AEC Data services — resource modeling, addressing, versioning and backward-compatible evolution, query APIs, and unifying overlapping surfaces into a single coherent contract.
• System Architecture: Define and evolve cross-team, cloud-native architecture across the AEC Data services; design distributed systems including service contracts and event-driven flows.
• Schema Design & Evolution: Design, document, and evolve data schemas for AEC domain entities (buildings, infrastructure, spaces, systems, components, relationships) — including semantic models, property sets, classification systems, and relationship hierarchies. Own versioning, backward/forward compatibility, deprecation and migration; maintain the schema registry, validation rules, and quality checks.
• Standards & Governance: Establish standards, reference architectures, and reusable components; author architecture proposals and decision records (ADRs) for review by a cross-org architecture council, and run cross-team design reviews.
• Prototyping & Feasibility: Evaluate alternative architectural directions through modeling and prototyping, de-risking key decisions before broad adoption.
• Mentorship & Technical Leadership: Mentor developers and fellow architects on emerging and established technologies and on architectural practice; grow technical depth across teams.
• Reliability & Performance: Ensure reliability, security and performance of systems; define SLOs and drive observability (metrics, tracing, logging).
• Communication: Communicate architecture with clear views and diagrams (e.g., C4) and executive-ready narratives; produce comprehensive documentation and onboarding materials.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years designing cloud-native, distributed systems, including 5+ years at cross-team architect altitude (Software Architect, Principal Developer, Staff+ or equivalent). Title is flexible; scope of impact is the primary consideration.
• Deep expertise in cloud services (ideally AWS), API/service design, and distributed-systems patterns (microservices, event-driven, resilience).
• Solid grounding in data modeling and schema design — including schema definition languages (e.g., JSON Schema), versioning, and backward/forward-compatibility and evolution strategies — as applied both to standalone data schemas and to API contracts. Specialist data-warehouse or analytics architecture is not required.
• Excellent knowledge of software design and architecture patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across teams outside the candidate's direct management.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with a track record of guiding and growing diverse, cross-functional teams.
• Mastery of conveying complex ideas concisely and persuasively, with excellent verbal, written and presentation skills across a wide range of stakeholders.
• Ability to collaborate with a global team.

Preferred Qualifications

• Core Cloud Services: AWS and its core services (EC2, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS).
• Distributed Systems: domain-driven service decomposition, data consistency patterns (CQRS, event sourcing, sagas) and multi-tenant/multi-region design.
• API & Service Design: REST API design and evolution; GraphQL (including federation).
• Database Architecture: relational and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB, PostgreSQL).
• Observability/SRE: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics/SLO for data services.

Bonus

• Semantic Technologies: knowledge graphs, RDF/OWL or property graphs — particularly relevant for the connected/semantic AECDM.
• BIM Expertise: Building Information Modeling concepts, Revit families or similar parametric modeling systems.
• AI Systems: RAG, agents/MCP, agentic orchestration (LangGraph, Semantic Kernel), LLM observability, and data governance / AI safety (PII, prompt-injection, content filtering).
• Domain-Specific AI for AEC: BIM/IFC extraction, CAD or point-cloud processing.
• Event-Driven Architectures: Kafka or Kinesis; schema registries (Confluent, AWS Glue); exactly-once processing.
• AEC Domain Knowledge: Experience in the architecture, engineering and construction industry; knowledge of industry standards (IFC, COBie, gbXML, CityGML, LandXML, UniFormat, OmniClass). Sector onboarding is provided.