Principal Architect

📋 Description

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

• Architect and enhance the overall software framework for Blockskye’s core platform, ensuring it is scalable, maintainable, and performs well across various services.

• Define and improve 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/latency.

• Design for responsible AI: implementing data governance for LLM workflows, managing PII, establishing defenses against prompt injection and hallucinations, and creating auditable decision trails for AI-supported travel, payment, and expense transactions.

• Spearhead the team’s embrace of AI-augmented engineering — establishing standards for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and agentic development workflows, and integrating them into architectural reviews and delivery processes.

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

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

• Offer hands-on guidance and mentoring to developers during system architecture, implementation, and code reviews.

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

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

• Partner with DevOps and Infrastructure teams to ensure the development of highly available, secure, and observable cloud-native systems (primarily in AWS).

• Create and sustain technical documentation for architecture diagrams, workflows, and system dependencies.

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

• Participate in initial technical scoping and estimation for roadmap initiatives.

• Promote the adoption of modern development practices such as microservices, event-driven architecture, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (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 standpoint (e.g., data flow diagrams, access controls).

• Stay updated with emerging technologies, tools, and architectural patterns to guide the long-term evolution of the platform.

• 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 discipline; advanced degree is preferred.

• Over 8 years of progressive experience in software development, including a minimum of 2–3 years in an architectural or senior technical leadership position.

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

• Practical experience in architecting production LLM-powered systems with at least one leading model provider (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI), demonstrating solid command of prompt engineering, structured output, tool/function calling, RAG, and agent orchestration.

• Daily, proficient use of AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar), with a proven ability to define and teach standards for their safe and effective use across a team — including agentic workflows for substantial engineering tasks, not just autocompletion.

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

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

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

• Proficient in designing and maintaining secure, maintainable, and well-documented RESTful APIs and system interfaces.

• Solid 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 track record of mentoring engineers, leading cross-functional technical discussions, and driving consensus.

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

• Comfortable operating in a remote-first, startup-to-scaleup environment with changing systems and priorities.

• A collaborative spirit, along 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