At Chain IQ, your ideas move fast.
Chain IQ is a global AI-driven Procurement Service Partner, headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, with operations across main centers and 16 offices worldwide. We provide tailored, end-to-end procurement solutions that enable transformation, drive scalability, and deliver substantial reductions in our clients' indirect spend. Our culture is built on innovation, entrepreneurship, ownership, and impact. Here, your voice matters - bold thinking is encouraged, and action follows ambition.
We are building a modern platform that combines workflow automation, data-driven insights, and emerging agent capabilities. This role defines how the system behaves as a whole. You design how services interact, how workflows execute, how automation is orchestrated, and how humans and agents collaborate safely and predictably.
This is a hands-on architecture role focused on real system behavior, not abstract diagrams. You work closely with product, engineering, data and security to ensure solutions are coherent, scalable, and operable.
Responsibilities
Design end-to-end system flows for complex, multi-step workflows
Define orchestration patterns for automation and agent-driven processes
Establish standards for synchronous and asynchronous interactions
Shape service boundaries, APIs and event models
Design lifecycle management for long-running workflows and delegated actions
Define retry, error-handling, compensation and escalation patterns
Ensure automation behaves predictably under failure and load
Collaborate with Security on guardrails and with Data on data access patterns
Review and evolve designs as the platform grows and new capabilities are introduced
Act as a technical sounding board for engineering teams building platform features
What you will work with
Distributed services and APIs
Event-driven and message-based systems
Workflow and orchestration engines
Automation pipelines and background processing
Agent-driven execution flows and tool invocation patterns
Multi-tenant system design considerations
Observability signals for system behavior and workflow state
Requirements
Strong experience designing distributed systems or platform solutions
Background in automation, workflow orchestration or complex application design
Ability to reason about system behavior over time, not just point interactions
Comfort working directly with engineers and reviewing implementations
Clear communication and structured thinking
Ability to balance flexibility with consistency across teams
Why this role matters
As the platform introduces more automation and agent-driven capabilities, system behavior becomes more complex. Users and internal teams rely on predictable outcomes, safe execution, and clear escalation paths. This role ensures the platform remains coherent and trustworthy as it scales.
Join a truly global team.
We offer a dynamic and international environment where high performance meets real purpose. We're proud to be Great Place to Work-certified and even prouder of the people who make that possible. Let’s shape the future of procurement - together.
Chain IQ – Create. Lead. Make an impact.
Information for agencies: Applications sent or uploaded by placement agencies or similar are not desired, will therefore not be considered and will be deleted.
Chain IQ is a global AI-driven Procurement Service Partner, providing strategic, tactical and operational procurement for its clients. Chain IQ operates from 6 main centers and 16 offices around the world – headquartered in Switzerland with hubs in Zurich, New York, London, Singapore, Mumbai and Bucharest to service more than 49 countries (including Germany, Poland, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia) and over 60 clients.
Chain IQ’s growing team of 700 experts is known for generating significant value via 3rd party spend management through volume bundling from its global clients, digitalization of procurement processes as well as achieving latest ESG standards.
