Contract Systems Architect – AI, AWS, Consumer Platforms

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Evaluate product needs, current architecture, and infrastructure; pinpoint risks, bottlenecks, and priorities.

• Create AWS architectures for consumer applications, including APIs, computing, storage, databases, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing.

• Assess AI models and providers with respect to representative workloads, balancing output quality, latency, reliability, privacy, and costs.

• Develop capabilities for retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, tool utilization, and agent orchestration.

• Set up production controls for AI workflows, encompassing evaluations, tracing, execution limits, retries, fallbacks, and human approval.

• Tackle authentication, authorization, user data security, traffic surges, abuse prevention, and ensuring responsive user experiences.

• Specify infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, environment segregation, monitoring, backup, and recovery practices.

• Collaborate with engineers on implementation, review critical code and infrastructure alterations, and validate assumptions through prototypes or load testing.

• Record decisions and ensure a clear handoff for independent team operation and expansion.

• Provide architecture evaluations, prioritized recommendations, target architectures, implementation strategies, prototypes or production components, infrastructure code, deployment configurations, runbooks, benchmarks, and handoff documentation.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience as a Systems Architect, Staff/Principal Engineer, or technical leader in building and operating production software.

• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS and the ability to articulate service selections and architectural trade-offs.

• Background in launching consumer applications and overseeing growth, availability, performance, and infrastructure expenses.

• Production experience with LLM integration and developing AI workflows beyond mere demonstrations or proofs of concept.

• Up-to-date knowledge of leading commercial and open-weight models, with a consistent approach to evaluating new releases.

• Strong backend engineering proficiency in Python, TypeScript/Node.js, or similar languages.

• Familiarity with relational databases, caching, messaging, containers or serverless architectures, and infrastructure as code.

• Practical awareness of AI security challenges, including prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, and excessive tool permissions.

• Excellent written communication, dependable project estimation, and experience delivering independently within a defined scope.

• Candidates in North American time zones are preferred; those in other regions must demonstrate suitable working-hour overlap.

• Additional valuable experience with early-stage startups, Amazon Bedrock, direct model-provider APIs, agent frameworks, MCP integrations, retrieval systems, vector search, personalization, multimodal AI, model routing, inference optimization, and cost measurement.

🏝️ Benefits

• Engagement as a project-based independent contractor.

• Compensation on an hourly or fixed project fee basis, depending on scope and experience.

• Flexible scheduling with mutually agreed upon overlap.

• Potential for follow-on projects.