Software Architecture Lead

Software Architecture Lead

Arrow Audiology — Springfield, MO Full-time · On-site $150,000 – $190,000 a year

About us

Arrow Audiology operates retail audiology clinics and provides audiology services to ENT practices. We build and run our own clinical and business operations software — four suites that run a clinic end to end, from the clinical care tools a provider uses in a fitting through to the systems that run performance reporting, facilities and acquisitions.

That software isn't a side project. It's how the company works, and it's built in-house.

Read this part first

We develop AI-first. Agents write the code.

That changes what an architect does here, and it's the thing most likely to be a mismatch.

You would not spend your days writing implementation code, and you would not spend them drawing diagrams for other humans to read. You'd spend them shaping a system so that agents can work inside it without breaking things — and owning the gates that catch it when they do.

Concretely, that means the codebase has to be structured so a loop can be wrong in isolation. Clear seams. Explicit contracts. Specs and rules written to be consumed by a machine, not filed in a wiki. Modularity defended against generated code that always wants to sprawl.

If that sounds like a diminished version of architecture, this isn't your job. If it sounds like the actual problem — and one most places haven't started thinking about properly — keep reading.

What you'll do

• Shape the system for machine consumption. Repo structure, module boundaries, domain rules, stack decisions. The seams that let separate agent loops run without colliding.
• Write the contracts and specs agents work from — schema and API contracts, domain invariants, architectural decision records, the rules files that keep agents inside the lines. This is a writing job as much as a design job.
• Own CI/CD and the automated suites. These are the hard pass/fail bar that every agent loop has to clear before anything reaches a human. You own that bar and you decide what it catches.
• Review plans before code lands. The cheapest place to stop a bad direction is in the proposal. Structural review sits with you, and you can block a start when the seams aren't safe for agents to work in — or block a ship when the automated gates fail.
• Slice work so loops can fail cheaply. Deciding how a piece of work gets cut up is most of what makes agentic development fast or miserable.
• Defend modularity. Generated code sprawls by default. Someone has to notice and push back, repeatedly.
• Drive agent loops yourself, early on. Until there's a dedicated orchestration seat, you'd also be turning briefs into task queues, running the loops, triaging output and pushing CI send-backs. That's an explicit phase, not the permanent shape of the job — but it's real work for your first stretch here, and you should want it rather than tolerate it.
• Set the security and compliance guardrails into the structure, so that the safe path is the default path rather than something that gets remembered.

What we're looking for

Architecture judgment that came from building things and living with them. You've shaped a codebase other people worked in, and you've been around long enough to have been wrong about a boundary and had to unpick it. That experience is what lets you look at a proposed approach and know it cuts against the grain before anyone writes a line.

Specifically:

• You already work agentically on real production work — not experiments, not autocomplete. You have opinions about where agents fail, and they came from being burned.
• Strong contract and interface design. APIs, schemas, module boundaries, domain modeling. The parts of the system that are expensive to change later.
• Real care with data. Schema design, migrations and SQL are the place we want slow, careful attention. Mistakes there are expensive or impossible to undo.
• CI/CD and test infrastructure as a first-class skill, not something you delegated. You'd own the harness that gates every loop, so you need clear views on what belongs in it and what a green suite actually proves.
• You can write for machines. Precise specs, rules and contracts that an agent follows correctly without a human in the room to interpret them. Increasingly the core architectural skill, and still rare.
• Comfortable being hands-on. You'd be shipping, reviewing and running loops, not supervising from a distance.
• Willingness to say no, and to say why. You can block a start. That only works if you'll use it and can explain the reasoning without it becoming a fight.

Nice to have

• Healthcare software, or another regulated domain — HIPAA shapes real decisions here
• Experience in a multi-tenant or multi-site product, where one clinic's configuration can't break another's
• Having been an early technical hire somewhere
• Data and analytics platform experience

No computer science degree required. No audiology experience required.

One constraint worth knowing upfront: we work with protected health information, and there are firm rules about what data goes where — including what can be sent to which tools. You'd help set some of those rules, so you need to understand the reasoning rather than just apply it.

Being straight with you

Small team, on-site in Springfield. You'd be one of a handful of technical people, working directly with a hands-on CTO who writes and reviews code — not a manager who used to.

You'd wear two hats at the start. Architecture and orchestration both, until the orchestration seat is filled. We've written that down as a scaling phase with an end rather than pretending it isn't happening, but it does mean your first months are heavier on running loops and lighter on structural work than the job will eventually be.

A lot of what you'd build doesn't exist yet. The rules, the contracts, the harness, the conventions — you'd be authoring them rather than inheriting them. Some people find that the best part of a job like this and some find it exhausting.

The work is used by clinicians with patients in the room. Reliability matters more than elegance here, and a bad migration is a much worse day than an inelegant module.

Benefits

Health, dental, vision, PTO,

Arrow Audiology is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.

Pay: $150,000.00 - $190,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Health savings account
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Work Location: In person