The Job, Stated Plainly

Somewhere in your org there's an architecture doc nobody's opened since the kickoff meeting. This role doesn't produce those.

Techdome is hiring someone to own the technical spine of an 80+ engineer studio that builds systems handling real patient data and real money — not staging data, not a demo environment. The architecture you design this quarter is the architecture you're paged about next quarter. You'll sit in the design review, write the PR that sets the pattern, run the incident retro when something breaks at 2am, and sit across the table from the client who's trusting your judgment over their own instinct. Same person, all four rooms.

This isn't a diagramming job with an architect title bolted on. If what draws you to architecture is the leverage of being right and present — not the authority of a title — this is written for you.

The Shape of the Work

You own the platform, not a slice of it. Service boundaries, data models, API contracts, and the parts of the job nobody puts on a highlight reel — encryption strategy, observability, cost curves, the scaling plan for eighteen months from now. All of it traces back to you.

The compliance load is real, not theoretical. PHI moves through this system, which means audit logging, access control, tokenization, and encryption in transit and at rest aren't checkboxes — they're the architecture. Payment data stays walled off with no exceptions, including the exception someone will eventually ask you to make under deadline pressure.

The stack is MERN, end to end, with the infrastructure that keeps it alive in production. MongoDB, Express, React, Node — plus containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and secrets management you've actually operated, not just specified in a doc.

You make the trade-off calls and you own what happens after. Monolith or microservices, build or buy, synchronous or event-driven — every one of these is a bet, and you're expected to defend it with evidence months later when someone asks why the system behaves the way it does.

Your patterns outlast your projects. Code review standards, reference architectures, the default way this studio solves a recurring class of problem — you're setting the baseline that other architects and tech leads inherit, whether or not they ever meet you.

AI tooling is load-bearing here, not a novelty. Engineers across the studio ship daily with Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor. We're not looking for someone who's merely used these tools — we want someone with a real point of view on how they change what architecture even means when a junior engineer can generate a service in an afternoon.

You grow people without a reporting line to lean on. Senior engineers become tech leads here through the judgment you demonstrate and the trust you build, not through your position on an org chart.

Clients take the hard recommendation from you — the one that costs more, takes longer, or contradicts what they walked in wanting — because your track record has already done the persuading.

What Gets You In the Room

7+ years of production ownership at architect, principal, or staff engineer level, with 2–3 years as the final technical authority on a platform — the person whose sign-off actually meant something, not one voice among several.
You still write code. Real, current Node.js and React experience — MERN specifically is preferred, but a strong Node-centric full-stack background gets you a serious look too.
Cloud fluency that comes from running things, not just drawing them — AWS, GCP, or Azure, with the networking, security, and cost-optimization instincts you only get from being on call for what you built.
A regulated or high-stakes domain you've actually been burned by — HIPAA/PHI, PCI-DSS, fintech, banking, insurance, or something comparably unforgiving.
Trade-offs you made and then had to live with — not hypotheticals, actual decisions with actual consequences you can walk someone through.
The composure to hold a skeptical room — engineers who'll push back, clients who came in with a different plan — and bring them around with evidence instead of authority.

What Moves You to the Top of the Pile

HIPAA experience that's actually been audited — BAA-covered infrastructure, PHI access controls, audit trails that held up under scrutiny.
Payment systems work with Stripe, Braintree, or similar — tokenization, reconciliation, life inside a PCI-DSS environment.
Event-driven and microservices architecture at a scale where it actually mattered.
Time spent in consulting, multi-product, or venture-studio settings, where you're solving the same class of problem for different clients back to back.
A history of setting technical standards across teams or products — not just the one you happened to be closest to.
Opinions on AI-assisted development you're willing to defend in an argument, because you've actually built the practice, not just read about it.

What Success Looks Like at Six Months

You've shipped at least one architectural decision that other engineers now cite as precedent. You've run an incident retro that changed how the team builds, not just how it apologizes. A client has taken your recommendation over their original plan — and it worked out. Somewhere in the codebase, there's a pattern with your fingerprints on it that a new hire picks up without ever being told to.

Who Should Probably Skip This

If architect means Visio diagrams and a handoff to someone else's implementation, this will frustrate you fast. If you'd rather not be the one explaining, at 2am, why the system did what it did — this isn't your role. And if regulated-industry constraints read to you as red tape rather than the actual point, you'll fight the job the whole way through.

Why Techdome

We're bootstrapped and profitable — no investor deck to perform for, no growth-at-all-costs mandate distorting the architecture. 80+ engineers across Hyderabad, Indore, Mumbai, Dubai, and the US, and we take equity in what we build alongside our clients. That's not a perk line — it's why the people here still care about a system a year after launch. We don't get to walk away when the invoice clears, so we don't build like we will.

Principal Software Architect Regulated Systems (Healthcare & Payments)