We are looking for a hands-on Solution Architect who both builds and designs. In this role you will spend a significant portion of your time as a working engineer — writing code, shipping features, and solving problems directly alongside the team — while also owning the technical direction of core product platforms: designing and reviewing solutions end-to-end, guarding the health and longevity of our technology stack, and acting as the technical bridge between engineering, QA, DevOps, and the business. You will also lead our adoption of AI-assisted development and AI-powered product capabilities, helping the organization move fast without compromising reliability, security, or maintainability.
This is a senior individual-contributor role with strong architectural authority — you won't manage people, but you will set technical direction, review designs, and be accountable for the platform's technical roadmap, all while remaining an active contributor in the codebase.
Role Evolution: This role is intentionally weighted toward hands-on engineering delivery early on, with architectural responsibilities growing over time. As you establish credibility, build platform knowledge, and demonstrate architectural judgment, the balance is expected to shift — increasing time on design, roadmap, and cross-team architecture leadership, and decreasing time on direct feature delivery. The exact balance will be discussed and adjusted with your manager as you grow in the role.
What You'll Do
Hands-on Engineering & Delivery
- Actively design, build, and ship production code as part of the engineering team — this is not a design-only or review-only role.
- Take ownership of complex features or technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation, testing, and deployment.
- Lead by example on code quality, testing discipline, and engineering best practices through your own delivery work.
- Stay close enough to the codebase to make architecture decisions that are grounded in real implementation constraints, not just theory.
- Balance delivery work with architectural responsibilities, with the expectation that this balance shifts toward architecture as you grow in the role (see Role Evolution above).
Architecture & Design
- Own end-to-end solution architecture for web/cloud applications, including system design, integration patterns, data flow, and non-functional requirements (performance, security, scalability, availability).
- Review technical designs and pull requests from a design-integrity standpoint; provide constructive, actionable feedback to engineering teams.
- Produce and maintain architecture diagrams, decision records (ADRs), and technical documentation that keep the system understandable as it grows.
- Define and enforce coding, integration, and API standards across services.
Technology Stack & Lifecycle Management
- Maintain a living inventory of the platform's tech stack (languages, frameworks, libraries, databases, middleware, cloud services) and their support/EOL timelines.
- Proactively plan and lead upgrades for components approaching end-of-support or end-of-life, minimizing disruption and technical debt.
- Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and platform services; make build-vs-buy and adopt-vs-avoid recommendations backed by clear trade-off analysis.
- Define and drive a rolling technical roadmap (6–18 months) covering modernization, deprecation, and risk reduction.
Cloud & Infrastructure
- Architect and guide the use of AWS services (compute, storage, networking, managed databases, messaging/queueing, identity/IAM) with a focus on cost efficiency, security, and resilience.
- Own CI/CD design and standards using GitHub Actions, partnering with DevOps on pipeline structure, environment promotion, secrets management, and deployment automation.
- Partner with DevOps on infrastructure-as-code practices, observability (CloudWatch, Datadog, or equivalent), and environment strategy.
- Ensure architecture decisions account for compliance and data-security requirements relevant to the industry (e.g., healthcare data handling, access controls, audit trails) within the AWS environment.
Performance & Optimization
- Identify performance bottlenecks (application, database, network) and drive remediation plans — including direct implementation of fixes where appropriate.
- Establish and monitor architectural quality metrics (latency, error rates, scalability limits, technical debt indicators).
- Champion refactoring and modernization efforts that reduce complexity and operating cost over time.
Cross-Team Collaboration
- Act as the technical liaison between engineering, QA, DevOps, product/business stakeholders, and leadership — translating business requirements into technical solutions and vice versa.
- Facilitate design and architecture review sessions; align stakeholders on trade-offs, timelines, and risk.
- Support QA in defining testability and non-functional test strategy for new architecture (performance, security, resilience testing).
- Mentor engineers on architectural thinking, design patterns, and best practices — reinforced through pairing and shared delivery work.
AI Adoption & Innovation
- Lead the evaluation and rollout of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., AI coding assistants, automated code review/testing tools) across engineering teams.
- Identify and prioritize opportunities to embed AI/ML capabilities into the product where they add genuine user or business value.
- Define guardrails for responsible AI use — data privacy, model reliability, human oversight — in collaboration with security/compliance stakeholders.
- Stay current on the AI tooling landscape and bring pragmatic, ROI-driven recommendations rather than hype-driven adoption.
What We're Looking For
Required
- 5–10 years of experience in software engineering, with recent, active hands-on coding experience — this role requires you to remain a practicing engineer, not just an architect who reviews from a distance.
- At least 2–3 years operating in a Solution Architect, Technical Lead, or equivalent architectural capacity, ideally in a role that combined delivery and design responsibilities.
- Proven experience designing and delivering production-grade applications on AWS — hands-on with core services such as EC2/ECS/Lambda (compute), S3 (storage), RDS/Aurora (relational data), IAM (identity/access), VPC/networking, and CloudWatch (observability). [Confirm exact AWS services in use once stack details are available.]
- Strong grasp of modern application architecture patterns: microservices/modular monoliths, event-driven design, REST/GraphQL APIs, caching strategies, and database design (relational and/or NoSQL).
- Track record of planning and executing technology upgrades or migrations (framework version upgrades, EOL software replacement, AWS service migrations) with minimal business disruption.
- Hands-on experience with GitHub Actions for CI/CD — building and maintaining build, test, and deployment workflows, managing secrets/environments, and integrating automated quality gates.
- Experience working directly with DevOps on infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform or AWS CloudFormation/CDK) and monitoring/observability tooling (e.g., Datadog).
- Comfortable both writing and reviewing code across multiple languages/frameworks.
- Strong communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and align cross-functional teams.
- Practical experience integrating or piloting AI-assisted development tools or AI-driven features in a production environment.
Nice to Have
- Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or another regulated industry (HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, or similar compliance frameworks).
- Familiarity with security architecture principles (identity/access management, encryption, secure API design).
- Experience with performance/load testing tools and capacity planning.
- Certifications in cloud architecture (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
- Prior experience mentoring engineers or leading a Center of Excellence / architecture guild.
Success Looks Like
- Consistent delivery of shipped features/technical initiatives alongside architectural output — this role is measured on both.
- A documented, current technology roadmap with clear ownership of upgrade and deprecation timelines.
- Design review process that consistently catches architectural risk before it reaches production.
- Measurable improvements in system performance, scalability, observability etc.
- At least one AI-adoption initiative (tooling or product feature) piloted and scaled based on demonstrated value.
- Strong working relationships across dev, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders, reflected in smoother cross-team delivery.
- Over time, a visible shift from primarily hands-on delivery toward architecture and technical leadership, tracked as part of career growth conversations.