Domain Architect

Company: Later?Domain Architect????
Location: Chicago
Posted on: April 3, 2026

Job Description:

Later is the world’s most intelligent influencer marketing company, built to give brands the confidence to create unforgettable campaigns. By combining real creator relationships, trusted intelligence, and expert guidance, Later removes fear and guesswork from one of marketing’s most visible investments. Built on a native, AI-powered platform and more than a decade of proprietary data—including billions of social interactions, impressions, and $2.4B in verified influencer-driven purchases—Later helps teams understand what will work before they launch. By combining trusted insight with expert guidance, Later removes guesswork from influencer marketing, enabling brands to choose the right creators, execute fully managed campaigns, and drive meaningful growth across awareness, engagement, and revenue. Trusted by leading enterprise brands including Nike, Wayfair, Unilever, and Southwest Airlines, Later bridges creativity and performance so campaigns don’t just look good—they deliver results. Learn more at later.com . About this position: We’re looking for a deeply technical, strategically minded Domain Architect to lead the next evolution of our platform architecture. In this role, you’ll rapidly assess our existing systems, define convergence opportunities between key domains, and shape the integration strategy that drives scalability, velocity, and long-term technical excellence. You’ll bridge product, engineering, and data to define clear domain boundaries, establish technical standards, and guide the modernization of our architecture—ensuring we balance innovation with business impact. This role is ideal for an experienced architect who thrives in fast-moving environments, understands the trade-offs between pragmatism and purity, and can translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable decisions across teams. What you'll be doing: Strategy Evaluate and define the target-state domain architecture across multiple products, identifying convergence opportunities and technical debt reduction paths. Design and lead a scalable integration strategy between heterogeneous systems (e.g., Rails Node/React Native via APIs, Kafka, or event streams). Define domain boundaries and service ownership models that enable sustainable growth and platform flexibility. Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align architectural priorities with product roadmaps and business outcomes. Lead cross-functional discussions on modernization strategy, balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability. Technical/ Execution Decompose monolithic applications (Rails, Django, Laravel) into domain-based services or bounded contexts, using domain-driven design principles. Define integration and data synchronization patterns between distributed systems, ensuring schema evolution and API versioning best practices. Architect core platform services—authentication, identity, content, and analytics—shared across web and mobile products. Apply deep hands-on knowledge of AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Postgres, EventBridge/SNS/SQS) and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation). Introduce observability, monitoring, and CI/CD standards (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) that support secure, high-quality releases. Provide technical mentorship and architectural reviews to ensure strong engineering standards and knowledge transfer across teams. Team / Collaboration Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leaders to guide architecture decisions that optimize both user experience and technical sustainability. Contribute to architecture guilds and domain working groups, defining shared frameworks and principles for system evolution. Communicate architectural trade-offs clearly—speed vs scalability, build vs buy, monolith vs microservice—to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Author and socialize Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), domain maps, and shared service contracts to ensure alignment and transparency. Act as a trusted advisor and mentor to senior engineers, promoting best practices in distributed system design and software craftsmanship. Leadership Lead by influence across engineering teams, setting a high bar for architectural rigor, documentation, and technical collaboration. Champion scalable, pragmatic engineering principles that accelerate business velocity while building for the future. Drive the adoption of a modern technical culture—balancing innovation, quality, and accountability. Research/Best Practices Stay current on evolving architectural paradigms (domain-driven design, event-driven systems, microservices, and data mesh patterns). Introduce architectural innovations and tools that improve developer efficiency, code quality, and system observability. Conduct architecture reviews and share learnings company-wide to foster continuous improvement and technical excellence. What success looks like: Clear domain boundaries and service ownership models are defined and adopted across engineering teams. Integration patterns between systems are reliable, documented, and scalable, supporting faster feature delivery. Architecture decisions are data-informed, balancing speed, cost, and technical debt effectively. The engineering organization demonstrates improved velocity and reduced friction between teams. Foundational technical debt reduction and modernization initiatives are underway, with measurable impact on reliability and maintainability. You’re seen as a collaborative, trusted technical leader who bridges architecture and product strategy seamlessly. What you bring: 10 years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a senior or principal architecture role. Proven expertise designing and evolving architectures in high-scale, multi-product environments (Rails, Node.js, React Native preferred). Deep understanding of domain-driven design (DDD), service decomposition, and event-driven patterns. Strong AWS architecture experience (ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, EventBridge, SQS/SNS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation). Demonstrated ability to modernize legacy systems incrementally, driving results without full rebuilds. Solid understanding of data synchronization, API design, schema evolution, and distributed systems reliability. Experience defining and implementing CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, and deployment strategies (canary, blue-green, multi-env). Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to simplify complex ideas for diverse audiences. Passion for mentorship, system design, and building architectures that enable product and team growth. How you work: Driven by Impact: You deliver results that matter—prioritizing high-value work, meeting deadlines, and adapting quickly while keeping outcomes clear. Strategic & Customer-Centric: You anticipate risks and opportunities, connect decisions to long-term growth, and build trust through proactive insights. Curious & Growth-Oriented: You seek knowledge, ask sharp questions, and apply learnings fast—challenging the status quo with a mindset of improvement. Collaborative & Resilient: You thrive in change by staying resourceful, solution-focused, and positive—removing roadblocks, sharing insights, and keeping morale high. Accountable & Honest: You own your work, hold yourself and others to a high bar, and use transparent feedback to drive growth. Emotionally Intelligent: You build trust through empathy and collaboration, foster inclusion, and inspire others with grit, optimism, and integrity. Our approach to compensation: We take a market-based & data-driven approach to compensation. We leverage data from trusted third-party compensation sources to help us understand the market value of a role based on function, level, geographic location, and scope. We evaluate compensation bi-annually, including performance and market-related factors. Our salaries are benchmarked against market Total Cash Compensation for the geographic location of our job posting. Compensation for some roles is structured as On Target Earnings (OTE = base commission/variable) while for others it is structured as Salary only. To comply with local legislation and ensure transparency, we share salary ranges on all job postings. Skills, experience and other factors help determine the final salary we offer which may vary from the original range posted. Additionally, all permanent team members are eligible to participate in various benefits plans as part of their overall compensation package. Salary Range: $200,000 - 230,000 OTE LI-Hybrid Where we work: We have offices in Boston, MA; Vancouver, BC; Chicago, IL; and Vancouver, WA. For select positions, we are open to hiring fully remote candidates. We post our positions in the location(s) where we are open to having the successful candidate be located. Diversity, inclusion, and accessibility: At Later, we are committed to fostering a culture rooted in an inclusion-first mindset at every level of the company, embracing the importance of hiring and building teams for culture add rather than culture fit . We openly build and maintain unbiased hiring, pay, and promotion practices to create a foundation for an equitable workplace, paving the way for systemic change. We are committed to creating a diverse environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer . All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, or age. Please let us know if you require any accommodations or support during the recruitment process.

Keywords: Later?Domain Architect????, Des Plaines , Domain Architect, IT / Software / Systems , Chicago, Illinois