SquareShift - Technical Architect

Technical Architect.

Location : Chennai, India (Hybrid) | Practice : Cloud, Data & AI | Reports to : Director of Engineering.

About SquareShift

SquareShift is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, Looker Delivery-Verified Partner, and Elastic Professional Services partner. We design and build production cloud, data, and AI/ML systems for ISVs, SaaS companies, and enterprises across the US and India. Our work is technically dense multi-tenant data platforms on BigQuery, semantic layer migrations to Looker, observability and SIEM on Elasticsearch, and a growing portfolio of internal agentic AI products. Architects at SquareShift are not slide-deck architects. They write reference implementations, pair with engineers, and own technical decisions all the way to production.

The Role

We are hiring a Technical Architect to lead the design of our most complex engagements and to set the technical direction for one of our practice areas Cloud & Data Platforms, AI/ML & Agentic Systems, or Observability & Search. You will be the senior technical voice on 2-3 concurrent engagements : scoping with clients in pre-sales, owning the architecture from RFC to go-live, and resolving the hard problems that engineers cannot resolve alone. You will also help shape our reusable accelerators (T2L, M2L, P2L, C2L for BI migrations; agent frameworks for Conversational BI and AIResolveX) so that the second engagement of a kind is faster and cleaner than the first.

What You Will Own

Architecture & Design :

• Lead end-to-end architecture for client engagements : data platforms on GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Run, GKE, Dataflow, Pub/Sub), semantic layers in LookML, agent systems on Vertex AI / Google ADK, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch deployments at scale.
• Make the deployment-platform call Cloud Run vs GKE vs serverless based on workload shape, latency, cost, and the client's operational maturity. Document the trade-off, don't default to one.
• Write architecture decision records that engineers can build from and clients can defend internally covering trade-offs, alternatives considered, and operational implications.
• Own non-functional requirements : latency targets, cost envelopes, security posture (HIPAA/GDPR/PII handling where relevant), observability, and disaster recovery.
• Design for multi-tenancy, scale, and the realities of consulting handover code that the client team can run after we leave.

• Write reference implementations and the hardest 10-20% of code on each engagement the pieces that unblock the rest of the team.
• Run spikes and POCs to de-risk new patterns before they hit a delivery plan.
• Pair with senior engineers on debugging, performance tuning, and production go-lives.

• Partner with Pre-Sales on scoping calls, technical workshops, and SOW reviews. You are the engineer in the room when a prospect's CTO is asking hard questions.
• Build and maintain reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and migration playbooks within your practice area.
• Represent SquareShift externally partner technical reviews with Google Cloud and Elastic, blog posts, conference talks, and the occasional joint webinar.

• 8+ years in software/data engineering, with at least 3 years in an architect, principal, or staff-level role owning systems end-to-end.
• Deep, current expertise in at least one of our practice areas :
• Cloud & Data BigQuery at scale, Looker/LookML modelling, GCP services (Cloud Run, GKE/Kubernetes, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Vertex AI), Helm and container deployment patterns, and modern data stack tooling (dbt, Airflow).
• AI/ML & Agentic Systems production LLM applications, RAG architectures, agent orchestration (ADK, LangGraph, MCP), evaluation frameworks, and cost/latency engineering for LLM workloads.
• Observability & Search Elasticsearch/OpenSearch cluster design, ingest pipelines, SIEM/security analytics, and capacity planning at multi-TB ingestion scales.
• Production track record. You can point to systems running today, with traffic, that you designed and helped build.
• Strong design communication. Your RFCs and diagrams are clear enough that a senior client architect can disagree with you on substance, not on what you meant.
• Pragmatism. You optimise for the outcome not the most novel framework. You know when boring infrastructure is the right answer.

• Hands-on experience with Anthropic Claude, Google ADK, OpenRouter, or similar agent platforms in production.
• Background in BI migrations to Looker from Tableau, MicroStrategy, Cognos, or Power BI.
• Elastic certifications, Google Cloud Professional certifications, or open-source contributions in our ecosystem.
• Prior experience in a consulting or partner-led delivery model you understand the rhythm of pre-sales, SOW, delivery, and handover.

• Architecture with teeth. Our architects ship code, not just decks. If you have been quietly frustrated by architect roles that drift from production, this is a course correction.
• Variety with depth. Multiple engagements per year across genuinely different problem spaces without the chaos of a body-shop model.
• Direct partner access. Real working relationships with Google Cloud and Elastic engineering teams; you will ship things that show up in case studies and partner reviews.
• Influence on the AI roadmap. Our agentic product portfolio (Conversational BI, AIResolveX, Agentic QA) is being designed now. Architects here help decide where it goes.