Repetition is not the enemy of beautyMost prefabricated housing is ugly. Most beautiful housing doesn't get built, because it can't be priced, financed or manufactured.

Serotiny exists in the gap between those two facts. We design and manufacture prefabricated mass timber buildings — panels and modules, produced in a controlled environment, assembled fast on site. The repetition is the point. It is what makes the buildings affordable, low-carbon and deliverable at a moment when British Columbia badly needs all three.

But repetition is only a constraint if you treat it as one. A grid, a panel module and a fixed set of interfaces are not a cage — they are a rule system, and rule systems have produced some of the best architecture ever made. Depth, rhythm, reveal, shadow, the way a single panel type turns a corner, what happens when you rotate one element eight degrees: this is where the design work actually is.

We are looking for an architect who finds that exciting rather than limiting.

The roleYou own the front end. First massing study to development permit issuance, and then a clean handoff into production.

That means three things at once, and the job only works if you can do all three:

You are the designer. The massing, the façade, the material logic, the idea the project is actually about. If a scheme is dull, that is your problem to fix.

You are the entitlements lead. You take that design through rezoning and development permit in BC municipalities — planning staff, design panels, public hearings, comment cycles, council calendars. You know that a scheme which doesn't get approved is not a scheme.

You are the translator. You sit between the owner's pro forma, the city's bylaw, the AOR and EOR's documentation, and our DfMA team's manufacturing constraints. Four sets of demands that don't naturally agree. Making them agree — without quietly surrendering the design — is the craft of this role.

What you will actually doConcept and feasibilityTake a site, a bylaw and a pro forma, and produce options worth arguing about. Capacity and yield studies, density and siting tests, unit mix and efficiency, gross-to-net. Schemes with honest trade-offs attached, presented so a developer can decide rather than deliberate.

Massing and façadeThis is the part we care most about. Articulation, rhythm, fenestration strategy, materiality,



how the building meets the ground and meets the sky. Then the harder question: how do you get that variety out of a finite kit of parts, through composition, depth, cladding and openings rather than one-off geometry? Anyone can make an interesting building with unlimited parts. We want the person who can do it with sixty.

Owners, developers and the cityPresent to owners in commercial terms and to planners in urban design terms, and mean the same thing both times. Run pre-application meetings, design panels, open houses and public hearings. Take community feedback and turn it into design moves instead of concessions.

Zoning and development permitOwn rezoning, OCP amendment, DP and variance applications end to end. The package — drawings, design rationale, shadow and view studies, statistics, policy compliance. The schedule — submission dates, review cycles, council calendars — kept ahead of, not chased. The consultant team through entitlements: civil, geotechnical, landscape, transportation, arborist, energy, acoustic, code, envelope.

You will coordinate an external Architect of Record and Engineer of Record, not replace them. Define the scope splits, issue design intent, review what comes back against the approved design, and manage the handoff into permit and production so nothing quietly changes on the way through.

DfMABring our manufacturing team in at concept, not at DD. Resolve the design against panel and module dimensional discipline, grid rationalization, mass timber structural logic, interface and tolerance zones, transport and craning. And push back the other way: when a project exposes a gap in the kit of parts, document it and change the catalogue. The standard product gets better because of the projects, or it stagnates.

The craft of the officeSet the standards for concept and entitlement documentation on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Build workplans and time allowances that make this repeatable.



Find the parts of the process a machine should be doing and help us automate them. Mentor the designers coming up behind you.

Who we think you are

- Bachelor's or Master's in Architecture, and a portfolio that shows you can actually design — massing and façade, not compliant boxes.
- Six or more years in practice, with real ownership of concept design and entitlement work.
- You have taken multi-family or mixed-use projects through rezoning and DP in British Columbia. You know how Metro Vancouver municipalities really run their processes, not how they say they do.
- Working command of the BC Building Code, zoning bylaws and OCPs, the BC Energy Step Code and Zero Carbon Step Code, and the way recent provincial housing legislation has redrawn entitlement strategy.
- Fluent in Rhino or SketchUp, Revit, Adobe CS and rendering. Parametric or computational workflows for massing and façade studies are a genuine advantage.
- You can hold a room — a developer's boardroom, a design panel, a hostile public hearing.
- You can run several projects at once without any of them going quiet.
- You are willing to learn the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform properly during our four-week onboarding.

Especially compelling to us

- Registration with AIBC, or eligibility for registration or reciprocity.
- Experience with prefabricated, panelized, modular or mass timber delivery — including encapsulated mass timber construction under the BC Building Code.
- Experience coordinating an external AOR and EOR.
- Anyone who has designed inside a product system before and made it look like they weren't.

What you get
- Ownership of the design, from the first sketch to the approval, with your name on the outcome.
- A manufacturing team down the hall. You will see your details get built, get measured, and get built better the second time. Very few architects get that feedback loop.
- Work that is unambiguously about the housing and carbon problem in this province, not adjacent to it.
- A standard product you have a hand in shaping — every project you touch improves the catalogue for the next one.

How to applySend a CV and a portfolio. In the portfolio, flag one project and tell us the rule system behind it — the module, the grid, the constraint you were working against, and what you did with it. One page, or one drawing, is plenty.

- We will read that page first.

📌 Design Architect (British Columbia)
🏢 Serotiny Group
📍 British Columbia