Principal Architect

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

📋 Description

• Engage in hands-on coding to tackle complex challenges.

• Design and enhance the overarching software architecture for Blockskye’s core platform, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and performance across various services.

• Define and refine the architecture for Blockskye’s AI systems, including model selection, prompt orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, agent patterns, evaluations, guardrails, observability, and management of cost and latency.

• Architect for responsible AI by implementing data governance for LLM workflows, handling PII, establishing defenses against prompt injection and hallucinations, and creating auditable decision trails for AI-assisted travel, payments, and expense transactions.

• Spearhead the team's integration of AI-augmented engineering, setting standards for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and agentic development workflows, embedding them into architectural reviews and delivery processes.

• Collaborate with engineering leadership and product stakeholders to translate business objectives into robust technical solutions.

• Establish and uphold coding standards, architectural patterns, and best practices for system design across engineering teams.

• Provide hands-on guidance and mentorship to developers during system design, implementation, and code reviews.

• Lead architectural decision-making for significant new initiatives, integrations, and platform enhancements.

• Assess and select tools, frameworks, and third-party solutions that align with business and technical needs.

• Collaborate with DevOps and Infrastructure teams to ensure highly available, secure, and observable cloud-native systems, primarily in AWS.

• Develop and maintain technical documentation for architecture diagrams, workflows, and system dependencies.

• Contribute to system reliability and performance by identifying and addressing bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or architectural debt.

• Engage in early-stage technical scoping and estimation for roadmap initiatives.

• Promote the adoption of modern development practices such as microservices, event-driven architecture, and CI/CD.

• Review and guide API design (REST, Webhooks, etc.) to ensure clean, consistent, and versioned interfaces across teams and external partners.

• Facilitate cross-team architectural alignment and knowledge sharing through regular design reviews and technical discussions.

• Support compliance, security, and data governance requirements from an architectural perspective, including data flow diagrams and access controls.

• Stay informed about emerging technologies, tools, and architectural patterns to guide long-term platform evolution.

• Act as a key thought partner in Blockskye’s transition from a startup architecture to an enterprise-grade platform.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.

• Over 8 years of progressive experience in software development, with at least 2–3 years in an architecture or senior technical leadership role.

• Proficiency in multiple backend languages and modern web frameworks (e.g., Node.js, Python, PHP/Laravel, Go), with the ability to quickly become productive in unfamiliar stacks.

• Hands-on experience in architecting production LLM-powered systems using at least one frontier model provider (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI), demonstrating solid command of prompt engineering, structured output, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration.

• Daily, fluent use of AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent), with demonstrated ability to define and teach standards for their safe and effective use across a team, including agentic workflows for real engineering tasks beyond mere autocompletion.

• Working knowledge of AI system evaluation methods (offline evaluations, A/B testing of prompts and models), guardrails for hallucinations, prompt injection, PII handling, cost and latency management, and AI observability in production.

• Strong understanding of software architecture patterns, including microservices, event-driven systems, and domain-driven design.

• Proven experience in designing scalable, cloud-native systems, particularly on AWS (e.g., Lambda, RDS, S3, ECS/Fargate).

• Expertise in designing and maintaining secure, manageable, and well-documented RESTful APIs and system interfaces.

• Strong working knowledge of databases, including MySQL and caching strategies (e.g., Redis), with experience in query optimization and data modeling.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tools (e.g., CloudWatch, Datadog, Sentry).

• Ability to translate business requirements into high-level system designs and detailed technical specifications.

• Proven capability to mentor engineers, lead cross-functional technical discussions, and foster consensus.

• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with fluency in written and spoken English for effective remote collaboration.

• Comfort in a remote-first, startup-to-scale-up environment with dynamic systems and shifting priorities.

• A collaborative mindset coupled with a strong sense of ownership, quality, and commitment to continuous improvement.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance.

• 401(k) matching.

• Flexible work hours.

• Paid time off.

• Remote work options.