Senior Staff Architect, Octopart

Staff Architect for Octopart, you'll own the long-term architecture of the Octopart product and platform: how the domain evolves, how it aligns with the Common Data Model, and how the API serves teams across Altium, customers and partners. You'll drive a model-first, domain-driven approach to design, so teams agree on the domain before the implementation.

About Renesas Electronics

• Guide the architecture of data ingestion and search as data volumes and sources grow.
• Octopart is a global electronic component search and discovery platform that helps engineers and procurement professionals find, compare, and source the parts behind modern electronics.
• With 95+ million components from 11,000+ manufacturers and 600+ distributors, it brings technical specifications, pricing, and availability together in one place.
• Octopart reached 20 million unique users, giving our engineering team the opportunity to build products used at global scale.
• What makes this role different From search engine to platform.
• Octopart is where engineers find parts, pricing and stock.
• Octopart has a strong engineering team running the product.
• This role adds long-term thinking about how the Octopart domain and platform evolve.

Why the Architecture team?

• Join our Architecture team and help shape the future of Altium's products.
• The team works across Altium Designer, Altium 365 and Octopart; in this role you'll focus on Octopart and the products, customers and partners that build on it.
• We work cross-functionally with engineering teams across the organisation, its locations and languages.
• Teams make architecture decisions through an architecture advice process: we advise, connect people, own cross-cutting decisions and promote consistent architectural patterns across Altium.
• The role gives you a view of the whole of Altium's technology, and the chance to leave a lasting mark on how architecture is practised at Altium.
• Altium Limited, a part of the Renesas Group and headquartered in San Diego, California, is a global software company accelerating the pace of electronics innovation.
• We are redefining electronic product creation in a software-defined world with our industry-first cloud-based platform that unites every stakeholder and phase of electronics development.
• From startups to world’s technology giants, our digital platforms give more power to PCB designers, supply chain, and manufacturing, letting them collaborate as never before.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term architecture and direction of Octopart as a product and a platform, with engineering and product leadership.
• bounded contexts, shared domain models and alignment with the Common Data Model.
• Set API standards for the Octopart API: consistency, versioning, deprecation and schema evolution.
• Shape how Octopart integrates with Altium's products and with customer and partner systems.
• Work with the Altium teams that use the Octopart API, and with customers and partners through the Developer Center, and turn their needs into platform capabilities.
• Advise teams through the architecture advice process, and own cross-cutting decisions and their ADRs.
• Build prototypes and proofs of concept to test ideas before teams commit to them.
• Review designs and mentor engineers.
• expect deep dives into a large codebase and high-volume production systems.
• A track record of setting long-term architecture direction and seeing it through over several years.
• the Octopart API is a GraphQL API organised by bounded context, available to customers and partners through the Altium Developer Center .
• Connected across Altium.
• Octopart data flows into Altium Designer, Altium 365 and other products across Altium's portfolio, and into custom integrations built by customers and partners.
• Data at scale.
• Part details, offers, pricing and stock from manufacturers and distributors are imported every day, in large volumes.
• A domain worth modelling.
• Close to the team and the code.

Requirements

• Essential skills 10+ years in software development, with substantial experience as an architect of a large-scale, data-intensive platform.
• Practical experience with domain-driven design and model-first approaches, including introducing them to other teams.
• versioning, compatibility and schema evolution.
• Experience with large-scale data ingestion, processing and search.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and data storage.
• Strong engineering skills in a modern language, and the ability to prototype quickly.
• Ability to quickly grasp complex systems and work with incomplete information.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and experience working with many consuming teams, customers and partners.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools, with the discipline to review their output.
• Nice to have Experience with Go.
• Experience with React and Next.js.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, and with ScyllaDB or Cassandra.
• Experience with GraphQL federation and schema governance.
• Experience with common or canonical data models shared across products.
• Experience running a public API as a product: plans, limits and developer experience.
• Experience with MCP, LLM-based tools or agentic systems.

Why Octopart?

• Parts, manufacturers, sellers, offers, part families, reference designs and BOMs, aligned with Altium's Common Data Model .
• You'll work side by side with the Octopart engineering team in Cambridge, and still prototype and work in the code.

Preferred

• Experience with electronic components, supply chain or distribution data, or the electronics industry.
• Model-first, domain-driven design is at the core of this role.
• Octopart combines high-volume data ingestion, search and a public API, with technology ranging from Go services and a React/Next.js front end to Elasticsearch, ScyllaDB and GraphQL.

Benefits

• At Altium, our teams are empowered to innovate, collaborate globally, and help create the future of electronics development.
• We believe in rewarding our employees with a competitive benefits package alongside their salary.

• The long view.
• More information will be provided during the hiring process.