Staff Architect

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Our client is a technology-driven consumer company transforming fragrance discovery through a digital subscription platform. It also operates a portfolio of innovative fragrance and lifestyle brands focused on quality, individuality, and sustainability.

We are looking for a hands-on Staff Architect to own the platform architecture and drive AI-enabled capabilities across the engineering organization.
Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will establish engineering standards, guide cross-team technical decisions, and lead a platform team of two engineers while remaining deeply involved in system design and implementation.

The goal is to help the business scale through technology and AI without proportional growth in engineering headcount.

REQUIREMENTS:

8+ years of professional software engineering experience
3-4+ years in a Principal, Staff, or Platform Architect role
Deep hands-on Java expertise, including JVM performance, concurrency, and service design
Experience with Micronaut or Spring Boot
Strong knowledge of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, REST/GraphQL APIs, service mesh, and AWS cloud-native patterns
Hands-on experience designing, evaluating, or building AI-powered systems using modern LLM technologies
Experience with agent orchestration frameworks, tool integration, retrieval systems, or memory architectures
Strong understanding of data modelling, asynchronous messaging such as Kafka, and caching strategies at scale
Experience establishing and enforcing architectural standards across multiple engineering teams
Ability to combine architectural leadership with writing and reviewing production code
Strong systems thinking and the ability to clearly explain technical trade-offs
Excellent written and spoken English
Ability to work independently and asynchronously within a distributed team
At least 4 hours of daily overlap with New York working hours
Experience with Rust, GraalVM, JVM profiling, Kubernetes, Helm, or production EKS environments is a plus
Experience with ecommerce, subscription platforms, personalization, or high-scale consumer products is a plus

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Own the company’s platform architecture and AI enablement strategy
Define service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and shared infrastructure components
Lead the design of APIs, asynchronous messaging patterns, and foundational platform services
Identify and implement AI solutions that improve engineering productivity, operational efficiency, customer experience, and business outcomes
Design AI-augmented workflows, including agent orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, and memory management
Serve as the primary architectural authority for platform-level technical decisions
Establish cross-team engineering standards and shape the company’s long-term technical direction
Lead and mentor a platform team of two engineers
Set technical direction, conduct reviews, unblock engineers, and support their professional growth
Remain actively involved in architecture, implementation, code reviews, and technical problem-solving
Ensure systems are observable, scalable, fault-tolerant, and production-ready

OUR OFFER:

Fully remote, permanent position
Bonus program
Paid Time Off and Wellness Days Off
Ownership of a business-critical platform and its AI strategy
A focused senior team that moves quickly and trusts you to own your domain
Meaningful influence over how the company’s technology and products evolve
Smooth knowledge transfer from the current Principal Platform Architect