Software Architect

About the Role

This opportunity is offered through a partner company based in Ireland seeking a Software Architect to lead and shape the evolution of a large-scale distributed engineering platform. This role involves serving as the inaugural dedicated Architect to provide comprehensive technical direction and architectural leadership without direct team management duties. The position requires a blend of strategic system design and hands-on architectural involvement spanning distributed systems, APIs, data infrastructure, scalability, and reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain an up-to-date, holistic understanding of the platform architecture including data flows, service boundaries, responsibilities, and interdependencies.
• Identify and mitigate platform-wide risks related to scalability, reliability, performance, and cost before they impact production.
• Define and standardize API design and service patterns across REST APIs, SDKs, and MCP interfaces to ensure uniformity.
• Lead architectural roadmaps including cell-based designs, multi-region readiness, rate limiting, and feature flag systems, directly handling complex architectural challenges.
• Act as a technical authority setting priorities, driving architectural decisions through completion, documenting choices, and ensuring adoption across teams.
• Collaborate with Engineering leadership and senior engineers to align cross-team technical initiatives with strategic goals.
• Mentor senior engineering staff in system design, technical documentation, and architectural best practices.
• Enhance design review processes such as RFCs and cross-team reviews to be consistent, efficient, and beneficial.
• Develop and promote engineering standards covering observability, quality, security by design, API versioning, and evolution working alongside platform, security, and product teams.
• Evaluate and approve critical architectural designs while fostering engineering capability rather than imposing gatekeeping.
• Interpret business growth, new products, and AI/ML workflows into multi-quarter technical strategies and investment plans.
• Guide leadership on build-versus-buy decisions, platform investments, and risk assessments with clear, business-oriented communication.
• Champion AI adoption in engineering processes by developing approaches for AI-assisted design, coding, review, architecture, and documentation.
• Stay hands-on with prototyping, creating reference implementations, authoring technical documentation, and troubleshooting complex system issues.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Over 10 years of professional experience in software engineering, including a minimum of 3 years in a software architect role within large engineering organizations (100+ engineers), accountable for platform-level architecture.
• Proven leadership through influence, including steering senior engineers without direct authority and leading architecture or design review forums effectively.
• Expertise in distributed systems engineering and designing backend architectures capable of high throughput and low latency, ideally with Go or similar languages, Kubernetes, AWS, event-driven platforms, and data-intensive systems.
• Comprehensive knowledge across related layers, including client SDKs, data pipelines, and machine learning serving systems.
• Strong experience building scalable public APIs and SDKs with attention to versioning, backward compatibility, and consistent interface design.
• Ability to foresee and mitigate systemic tech risks proactively to prevent outages or failures.
• Excellent communication skills capable of translating complex technical concepts into understandable terms for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Preference toward asynchronous and thoroughly documented decision-making practices, with experience creating durable technical and architectural records.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI coding and reasoning tools into software design, prototyping, code reviews, documentation, and engineering workflows.
• Insight into designing codebases and APIs to enable safe and effective interaction by both engineers and AI agents.
• A pragmatic architectural mindset, balancing visionary strategies against practical delivery timelines and choosing simpler solutions when appropriate.
• Skill establishing a dedicated architecture function, building trust with existing leaders, and enhancing their impact without supplanting their roles.
• Additional desirable experience in fraud detection, identity systems, device intelligence, adversarial technology, multi-region or cell-based architectures, MCP, LLM integrations, or agent-facing API design is advantageous.
• Familiarity with high-volume data platforms such as ClickHouse or Kafka is a plus.

Benefits & Work Environment

• Fully remote role allowing work from various global locations subject to regulations (visa sponsorship unavailable).
• Competitive cash compensation for U.S.-based hires ranging between $177,000 and $240,000 annually, varying by location and experience.
• Chance to architect and lead a dedicated software architecture function within a major engineering organization.
• Close collaboration with senior engineering leaders and staff engineers across multiple teams.
• Influence over platform scalability, reliability, APIs, and foundational technical investments with an opportunity to shape AI-driven engineering practices.
• Diverse and inclusive global work culture valuing varied backgrounds and perspectives.

Additional Information

This role involves applications being considered through an AI-assisted selection process that helps quickly identify suitable candidates who are then reviewed by the partner company’s hiring team. The final hiring decisions and subsequent steps like interviews will be managed internally by the partner employer.

Applicants should note the data privacy notice: submitted information will be processed per GDPR and related regulations. AI tools may be used to support application review but do not replace human judgement. Candidates may inquire about data processing details if desired.