Senior Staff Software Architect– Cloud Data Platform & Industrial SaaS

Senior Staff Software Architect– Cloud Data Platform Industrial SaaS

Level: Senior Staff Software Architect– Cloud Data Platform Industrial SaaS

Experience: 20+ years

Reporting to: SVP, Engineering

Role Type: Enterprise Platform Architecture Leadership

Location: Santa Clara, CA

Role Mission

Picarro is building a hardware‑enabled Cloud Data Platform (CDP) to power multiple regulated industrial SaaS applications for Oil Gas, chemical plants, and refineries, including emissions compliance (HON, RSR), leak detection, and workplace safety.

The mission of this role is to define, own, and govern the Cloud Data Platform as a long‑lived enterprise SaaS foundation, enabling multiple products to be built quickly, consistently, and compliantly, without fragmenting data models, services, or architecture over time.

This role exists to solve problems above the application level. Required experience includes architecting enterprise SaaS platforms , not just distributed applications; proven ownership of canonical data models and foundational platform services that support multiple products over long lifetimes ; track record preventing platform entropy as product count, regulations, and customers scale.

What This Role Owns (Platform Scope)

Canonical Information Architecture (Critical)

Define and govern canonical, cross‑product data models that represent:

Instruments, assets, and deployments

Measurements and telemetry

Events, investigations, and findings

Regulatory evidence, audit artifacts, and lineage

Ensure platform data models are:

Independent of any single product or regulation

Stable across hardware generations and SaaS releases

Evolvable through explicit versioning and backward‑compatibility strategies

Prevent schema drift, product‑specific forks, and accidental coupling between applications .

In short, ensure that data models stay canonical and services stay platform‑level. Applications stay consumers – not redefiners – of the platform.

Platform Services Architecture (Not Application Services)

Design and own foundational platform services , such as:

Identity, tenant, and environment lifecycle

Asset and instrument registry

Measurement normalization and provenance

Regulatory evidence, audit, and traceability

Data retention, purge, and legal hold

Define clear boundaries between:

Platform services (built once, reused everywhere)

Application services (product‑specific logic and workflows)

Establish governance so platform services remain durable and uncluttered by product needs

Enterprise SaaS Platform Foundations

Own the multi‑tenant SaaS architecture , including:

Tenant isolation and hierarchy

RBAC and authorization at platform scale

Auditability, compliance‑by‑design, and data residency

Ensure the platform can support multiple products, customers, and regulatory regimes concurrently.

Design for 10+ year data lifecycles typical of regulated industrial customers.

Architectural Governance Decision Authority

Serve as the final architectural authority for platform‑level decisions.

Establish and enforce:

Reference architectures

Allowed and disallowed patterns

Evolution and deprecation rules

Balance short‑term delivery pressure with long‑term platform integrity and cost.

Architect Leadership Amplification

Lead and align existing architects (e.g., platform data architects and application architects).

Clarify decision boundaries:

Platform architects define foundations and invariants

Application architects extend the platform without redefining it

Raise architectural maturity across the organization without centralizing all design work.

What This Role Explicitly Is NOT

Not a senior application architect

Not a data‑pipeline or analytics specialist

Not a product‑specific domain expert

Not a hands‑on IC building features or workflows

This role is about architectural ownership, coherence, and longevity .

Required Experience Profile

Must‑Have

20+ years in software architecture, with clear ownership of enterprise platforms

Prior experience designing or governing large‑scale SaaS platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, Adobe Cloud, ServiceNow, or equivalent)

Proven expertise in:

Canonical data modeling across multiple products

Platform service architecture (not just microservices)

Multi‑tenant SaaS security and compliance

Executive‑level technical judgment and decision‑making credibility

Strongly Preferred

Experience with regulated industries (energy, industrial, healthcare, finance)

Platforms integrating hardware / telemetry / edge systems

Track record of building platforms meant to outlive individual products

Success Looks Like

New industrial SaaS applications launch without redefining data models or core services

Regulatory capabilities are implemented once and reused across products

Platform complexity grows sub‑linearly as products scale

Architectural decisions are consistent, explicit, and durable

Application teams move faster with fewer architectural n…