CTO/Senior Architect

You’re joining a strategic initiative to help a major media and technology company build a new behavioral intelligence platform from the ground up. This is an embedded consulting role, not a traditional engagement. You’ll be shaping the technical foundation of a commercial unit that leverages large-scale behavioral data through AI and advanced data architecture.  Your role is to serve as the technical authority — making platform decisions, representing them to client stakeholders, and guiding the team through the complexity of data architecture, privacy-preserving systems, and multi-tenant infrastructure design. You’ll report to Blend’s Chief Solutions Officer while working directly within the delivery team, with regular visibility to the client’s executive leadership.  What You’ll Own  Platform Architecture & Decisions  • Define and validate the technical blueprint across cloud data warehouse, clean room infrastructure, embedding compute, and privacy controls  • Own the data modeling strategy for large-scale behavioral signals across multiple data sources and device types  • Design the embeddings architecture and feature store supporting advertising, commerce, and AI use cases  • Guide clean room design and ensure compliance with applicable privacy frameworks  Technical Leadership & Unblocking  • Identify and resolve critical path blockers across infrastructure, integrations, and identity resolution  • Pressure-test technical proposals against real-world scale and operational complexity  • Bridge between Blend’s engineering and data science teams and the client’s senior technical stakeholders  Executive Presence & GTM Alignment  • Participate in regular leadership touchpoints with the client’s commercial and product leadership  • Translate technical capabilities into commercially relevant differentiation  • Ensure the technical roadmap aligns with go-to-market milestones  • Serve as a credible technical voice in early client and partner conversations    Who You Are:  Technical Depth  • Enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, AWS, or equivalent)  • Real-time and batch data architecture  • ML/AI systems and embeddings infrastructure  • Data privacy frameworks and compliance-by-design approaches  • Clean rooms, DSPs, and SSPs  Executive Presence & Communication  • You’ve worked directly with CTO-level stakeholders — not through layers  • You move comfortably between technical depth and business context  • You articulate architectural tradeoffs clearly and in terms of business impact  • You’re comfortable in high-stakes client or investor settings  Problem-Solving Orientation  • You ask hard questions about scale, cost, compliance, and risk before committing to approaches  • You hold opinions but update them when presented with better information  • You see your role as unblocking the team, not bottlenecking it  Collaborative Mindset  • You’ve worked in embedded delivery or partner roles  • You don’t need to own everything to drive impact  • You value getting to the right answer over being the one with the answer    Required  • 10+ years in data or platform architecture, with at least 3 years on systems at significant scale  • Deep experience with Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or a comparable enterprise data platform  • Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy in high-stakes client or executive contexts  • Experience designing for privacy, compliance, or security constraints  • Background in consulting delivery or embedded partner roles  Nice to Have  • Clean room or federated data architecture experience  • Embeddings or feature store work  • Identity resolution or data monetization projects  • AWS or cloud infrastructure design  • DSP or SSP experience  Less Important  • Familiari