Product Architect — Zero-Touch Licensing & Entitlements @ Remote

Product Architect — Zero-Touch Licensing & Entitlements

Location: Remote with occasional Travel Required

Duration: 12 Months of Contract to Hire

About the Role

This is a hands-on Product Architecture role owning the licensing and entitlements capabilities used across the product portfolio. You will define the entitlement domain model, API and event contracts, and the zero-touch flows that connect ecommerce, SAP order forms, and product and service provisioning — eliminating manual touchpoints, including manual code changes, while ensuring entitlement data is accurate, auditable, and safely consumable by downstream product teams.

This is a product-level architecture role with real ownership. Your domain model and contracts will be adopted by other teams. Success is measured by the reduction of manual touchpoints and reliable downstream adoption without breaking changes.

What You Will Do

Product Architecture Ownership

• Own product-level architecture for Licensing & Entitlements — producing context and container diagrams, runtime and sequence flows, a canonical entitlement data model, and integration contracts that downstream teams can adopt confidently
• Define NFRs across latency, throughput, correctness, availability, operability, and security and privacy — with measurable acceptance criteria and observability dashboards to match
• Specify API-first and event-driven contracts so downstream products can consume entitlements reliably; version schemas and enforce backward compatibility as the domain evolves
• Coach delivery teams on documentation hygiene, contract testing, and observability for entitlement flows

Zero-Touch Ingestion & Integration Design

• Design zero-touch ingestion for SAP order-form data and related attributes, with explicit strategies to avoid manual table maintenance and manual code changes
• Define where join logic and data enrichment live — pipeline versus service — with idempotent processing, replay and backfill capabilities, and measurable data-quality SLIs
• Partner with platform and integration teams on Kafka and connector patterns to remove synchronous dependencies and reduce operational fragility
• Specify reconciliation strategies, replay tooling, and operational runbooks so that incident recovery is fast, auditable, and repeatable

AI-Assisted Data Quality

• Apply AI capabilities safely for data mapping, normalisation, and anomaly detection — scoped as decision-support with human approval, never as autonomous entitlement mutation
• Design evaluation and safety gates for any AI-assisted flows to ensure outputs are auditable and correctable

POC Execution & Governance

• Build targeted POCs and spikes to de-risk critical technical unknowns — including Oracle-table-to-stream approaches, Kafka payload design, and reconciliation strategies — and document all architectural decisions via ADRs
• Translate ambiguity and SME feedback into buildable work items with clear design traces, keeping the team ahead of unknowns rather than blocked by them

Outcomes & Measures

• A product architecture blueprint — C4 diagrams, sequence diagrams, and an initial ADR set — published within the first 30 days for at least one end-to-end flow: order ? entitlement ? provisioning
• Manual touchpoints measurably reduced or removed, with cycle-time reduction and lower defect rates tracked, and data-quality SLIs and alerting live
• Canonical entitlement schema and versioning strategy adopted by at least one downstream product integration
• Replay and backfill tooling and an operational runbook shipped and ready for incident recovery and reconciliation

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in product or application architecture for SaaS or distributed systems
• Proven experience designing data models and API and event contracts that support cross-team adoption and maintain backwards compatibility over time
• Solid Azure fundamentals — AKS, Key Vault, storage, networking, and observability — with practical application of Well-Architected Framework principles
• Strong NFR discipline: ability to define and validate measurable acceptance criteria for correctness, latency, reliability, and operability
• Hands-on POC capability and the ability to translate ambiguity into clear, buildable work items with supporting design traces

Preferred Qualifications

• Licensing and entitlements domain depth — including SKUs and offers, amendments, renewals, effective dating, and auditability requirements
• Kafka / Confluent experience — connectors, schema registry, consumer patterns, and replay strategies
• Experience integrating ERP and order management systems (SAP) into downstream SaaS provisioning flows
• Experience applying AI to data quality in controlled, auditable loops — anomaly detection, mapping assistants, and evaluation-gated workflows
• Familiarity with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service / MAF or equivalent orchestration tooling

Core Competencies

Systems thinking and pragmatic trade-off analysis — you reason clearly about where logic should live, how to keep it testable, and how to make it observable

Data integrity obsession — correctness, audit trails, and recoverability are non-negotiable design requirements, not afterthoughts

Communication range — you can deliver an executive narrative on entitlement strategy in the morning and provide code-level guidance on schema versioning in the afternoon

Bias for automation with explicit controls — you automate aggressively but always design rollbacks, operational runbooks, and clear recovery paths alongside the automation

Tools & Environment

• Editor: VS Code with Copilot Chat / Agents
• Languages: C# / .NET for production services; Python / TypeScript for POCs and evaluation harnesses
• Cloud: Azure — AKS / Kubernetes, Key Vault, Blob / ADLS, App Gateway / Ingress, Monitor / Log Analytics
• CI/CD & IaC: Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions; Bicep / Terraform
• Diagrams & Docs: Mermaid + C4 in Markdown; /docs in repo with ADRs in /docs/adr
• Eventing & Integration: Kafka / Confluent — schema governance and contract testing
• Data Stores: Oracle and service data stores; reconciliation and backfill tooling