Chief Architect

Chief Architect

VP of Engineering

Exempt

Colorado (On-Site / Hybrid)

Director

The Opportunity

Inovonics has spent decades earning the trust of the life safety and security industry. Our wireless sensor networks and monitoring systems protect people — in hospitals, senior living communities, schools, and commercial buildings, and in some of the nation’s most secure federal facilities — and that mission shapes everything we build. Our products depend on the seamless interaction of high-reliability RF hardware, embedded firmware, and cloud-connected software. Getting that integration right is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a product that works in the field and one that doesn't.

If you have spent your career building complex connected products — where embedded firmware, cloud services, and application software all have to work as one — at a large company and have been waiting for the chance to own the architecture rather than contribute a piece of it, this role was designed for you.

About Inovonics

Inovonics is a leading developer of wireless sensing and communications technology for life safety and security applications. Our product portfolio includes:

• High-reliability wireless sensor networks operating in the 900 MHz band, purpose-built for dense, interference-resistant environments
• Wireless emergency-call and resident-safety solutions for senior living and assisted-living communities
• Commercial security sensing platforms integrated with leading industry control panels and monitoring systems
• Cloud-connected architecture enabling remote monitoring, diagnostics, and configuration across large installed bases

Our systems are deployed in environments where failure is not an option. That standard drives our engineering culture and our commitment to getting the technical fundamentals right.

What You Will Own

The Chief Architect is the final technical authority on software and firmware architecture decisions at Inovonics. You will work in close partnership with our Hardware Engineering leadership — who bring deep domain expertise of their own — to ensure our full system architecture is coherent, scalable, and built to last.

Your ownership includes:

• End-to-end product architecture development — from concept through implementation, you are not advising on architecture, you are building it. That includes owning how feature architects and AI agents are directed through the delivery lifecycle, and accountability for the quality and certifiability of what they produce.
• Final architectural decision authority across software and firmware — you set the direction and your judgment carries
• System decomposition and interface definition between software, firmware, and hardware boundaries
• Technical roadmap for platform evolution, ensuring near-term product decisions do not compromise long-term architectural integrity
• The standards and patterns the engineering teams build to — set through the architecture you build, not dictated by a review board
• Cross-functional collaboration spanning engineering and the business — partnering with technical leaders on system-level decisions at the HW/SW/FW boundary, and with product marketing, product management, and sales to ensure the architecture is grounded in real market and customer needs, not technical preference alone
• Identification and mitigation of architectural risk, particularly in areas where system complexity creates product quality or certification exposure

What You Will Build

This is a role with real technical ownership, not an advisory seat. You will own:

• The operating model for AI-accelerated architecture and development — the agent-ready specifications, decomposition, interfaces, and guardrails that direct feature architects and AI agents through design, build, and test, and the human-in-the-loop gates at which their output is approved. Your architecture is the control surface that feature architects and their agents build on.
• Product architectures for current and next-generation Inovonics products
• Clear component responsibilities and interfaces across the system
• The key technical decisions, and the reasoning behind them, that set direction for the whole team
• A clear path for how the architecture evolves in step with product strategy
• The technical standards and patterns that give the hardware, firmware, and software teams a clear foundation to build on.

You will also be deeply engaged in product development — drive design reviews, hands-on in critical technical problem-solving, and involved in the decisions that determine whether a product ships on time and performs in the field.

Who You Are

You are technically elite and practically grounded — you have built and shipped real, complex connected products spanning embedded firmware, cloud, and application software, and you carry the scar tissue of architectural decisions that played out over years. Four traits define you, and all four are non-negotiable.