ERP Adaptive Lead Architect

QAD is a leading provider of ERP solutions purpose-built for manufacturing industries — automotive, life sciences, food & beverage, high tech, and industrial. Serving thousands of global manufacturers, QAD's Adaptive Manufacturing Cloud helps companies operate with greater precision, agility, and intelligence.

Enterprise software is entering a third era. The first gave manufacturers a System of Record — ERP that answered 'what do we have and what did we commit to?' The second gave them Data Infrastructure — the ability to move, analyse, and query that data at scale. The third era is domain-specific intelligence: AI agents that can act autonomously on manufacturing data, but only if that data has been given the context, relationships, and governed rules that allow an agent to reason correctly.

The Lead Architect i s one of three leaders who own the Adaptive transformation end to end, alongside the SVP Engineering and the Adaptive product lead. This person sets the technical and architectural direction for Adaptive ERP and keeps every workstream pointed at one target architecture. It is a senior, versatile role: deep enough in ERP to understand decades of product history, and modern enough to lead it toward a cloud-native future.

What success looks like

One coherent target architecture that every workstream builds toward, cross-team technical decisions made quickly, and visible progress in modernizing the product.

The benchmark is a chief-architect-calibre leader early in that arc: broad, credible with executives, and able to drive change rather than only advise on it.

Why QAD?

You’ll be shaping the future of intelligent manufacturing platforms at global scale—working with ambitious leaders, modern cloud technologies, and AI‑driven innovation that delivers real‑world impact.

Responsibilities

Set the architectural vision and technical strategy for Adaptive ERP and the transformation.; Keep technical decisions coherent across the ERP functional, platform, Lynx and Extensions, quality, and infrastructure workstreams.; With engineering and product leadership, define outcomes, sequence work, surface dependencies, and make the hard architectural trade-offs.; Lead modernization of platform, deployment, data, and integration while protecting upgradeability, security, and reliability.; Set architectural standards and guide the architects embedded in each engineering area.; Explain complex technical choices to executives, customers, and partners in business terms.

Requirements

Deep architecture experience on a major enterprise ERP product, understanding how business processes, application behavior, data, integrations, and deployment interact.; A proven record leading a large modernization of a mature enterprise product toward cloud and SaaS.; Strong grounding in modern architecture: cloud platforms (AWS preferred), services, APIs, extensibility, data, and DevOps.; The judgment and presence to operate as an accountable peer to senior engineering and product leaders.

Nice to have

Experience at SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Epicor, or a comparable ERP provider.; Manufacturing ERP experience.; Experience using AI in software development and in the product.