Lead Architect

Role: Product Area Lead Architect

Work: USA (est/cst) - Fully Remote

I’m working with a growing technology organization looking for a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands-on architectural leadership across multiple product teams.

This is a Principal-level architecture role, but it’s not an “ivory tower” position. You’ll be deeply involved with engineering teams, helping solve complex technical problems, establish standards, manage cross-team dependencies, and turn architectural strategy into practical execution.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead architecture across multiple autonomous engineering teams
• Identify and address architectural gaps, technical debt, and scalability risks
• Design scalable distributed systems, APIs, and cloud-native architectures
• Establish standards around APIs, authentication, observability, resiliency, and frontend architecture
• Guide modernization and decomposition of legacy systems
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, Platform, and DevOps teams
• Architect GenAI/LLM solutions, including RAG, conversational AI, and model integrations
• Establish responsible AI patterns around evaluation, privacy, guardrails, and output validation
• Help scale the effective use of AI coding tools across engineering
• Mentor senior engineers and architects while raising overall architectural maturity

What we’re looking for:

• 8–12+ years in software engineering and architecture
• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js experience
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and modern architecture
• Experience designing and evolving APIs and SaaS platforms
• Cloud-native experience, preferably AWS
• Experience with GenAI/LLMs, RAG, or ML integrations
• Experience working across multiple engineering teams
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills
• Pragmatic approach to architecture — able to balance long-term strategy with immediate execution
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar

If you're a senior/principal engineer or architect who enjoys being hands-on while influencing architecture across an organization, feel free to reach out or send me a message.