Software Architect

9-15 Years

Save

Early Applicant

Job Description

Job Description

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Architecture & System Design

Design and own scalable, secure, and maintainable backend architectures for new ventures from greenfield to production
Establish architectural patterns — microservices vs. monolith, event-driven design, API contracts — tailored to each company's stage and constraints
Define data models, storage strategies, and caching layers; make principled decisions on SQL vs. NoSQL, relational vs. graph
Conduct architecture reviews across portfolio companies, flagging technical debt early and proposing remediation paths

Platform & Infrastructure

Build and standardize cloud-native infrastructure on AWS / GCP — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, secret management, and observability stacks
Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets; implement reliability practices such as circuit breakers, retries, and graceful degradation
Champion cost-efficient infrastructure decisions without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity

Engineering Leadership & Culture

Partner with founders to make early technical hiring decisions — identifying the right profiles for each venture's stage
Mentor early-career engineers embedded within portfolio companies, establishing coding standards, review practices, and engineering culture
Translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical specs; bridge the gap between product vision and execution reality
Drive documentation discipline — RFCs, ADRs, runbooks — so engineering knowledge is never trapped in individual heads

Cross-Portfolio Leverage

Identify shared infrastructure opportunities across portfolio companies — auth layers, payments, notifications, data pipelines — and build reusable internal tooling
Stay current on emerging backend patterns, LLM integration paradigms, and developer tooling; introduce relevant innovations across the studio

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

9–15 years of professional backend engineering experience, with demonstrable ownership of production systems
3+ years in an explicit architecture, tech lead, or principal engineer role — not just unofficial architecture work
Deep proficiency in at least one strongly typed backend language (Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, or TypeScript/Node)
Must have experience in prompt engineering for code generation, integrating AI tools into team workflows, and critically reviewing LLM output for correctness and architectural fit.
Hands-on experience designing distributed systems — message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), event sourcing, CQRS, idempotency
Proven track record with cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP: ECS/EKS, RDS/Aurora, Redis, CDNs, IAM, and secrets management
Strong command of API design — REST, GraphQL, gRPC — and the ability to reason about versioning, backwards compatibility, and consumer contracts
Comfort operating in early-stage, ambiguous environments where requirements change and timelines are tight
Setting team norms around AI-assisted development: when to use it, how to review AI-generated code, and coaching engineers to apply architectural judgment and security scrutiny before anything ships.

Strong-to-Have

Experience at a startup studio, venture builder, or working across multiple products simultaneously
Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns — LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG pipelines, embedding workflows
Prior experience establishing engineering processes from scratch: on-call rotations, incident response, sprint cadences
Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling or published writing on system design

What We Offer

Meaningful equity — we treat the architect role as a founding-adjacent position, and compensation reflects that
Exposure to 2–4 early-stage companies simultaneously — the compacted learning of a decade in a few years
Direct access to founders, investors, and domain experts across sectors
Annual learning budget for conferences, courses, and books

Required Skills

[java, system design, architecture, LLM]

Additional Information

9–15 years of professional backend engineering experience, with demonstrable ownership of production systems
3+ years in an explicit architecture, tech lead, or principal engineer role — not just unofficial architecture work
Deep proficiency in at least one strongly typed backend language (Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, or TypeScript/Node)
Must have experience in prompt engineering for code generation, integrating AI tools into team workflows, and critically reviewing LLM output for correctness and architectural fit.