Principal Platform 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 Principal Platform 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