Staff Platform Architect (AI)

Staff Platform Architect (AI)

Own platform architecture and lead practical AI adoption across a growing engineering organization.

Java & distributed systems | AI / LLM systems | 60%+ hands-on work

is an e-commerce and fragrance subscription business helping customers discover, try and purchase perfumes from a selection of more than 1,000 designer fragrances. Its platform supports subscriptions, personalization, online shopping and a portfolio of owned brands.

About the role

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will shape the platform architecture and long-term technical direction of an organization of approximately 55 engineers. You will partner with engineering managers, SRE and a platform team of around 3-4 engineers to help the business scale through shared infrastructure, consistent standards and AI capabilities.

This is a highly practical role: more than 60% of your time is expected to involve hands-on engineering. You will mentor platform engineers and guide teams across the company; the direct-report structure is still being finalized.

What you will do

• Own platform architecture. Define service boundaries, integration patterns, shared components and engineering standards that support business growth.
• Design and build distributed systems. Develop platform services, APIs, data contracts and asynchronous messaging, making clear trade-offs around performance, reliability and maintainability.
• Lead AI adoption. Identify and deliver AI initiatives with measurable impact on engineering productivity, operations, customer experience and business outcomes.
• Build AI workflows. Implement agent orchestration, tool and skill integrations, retrieval capabilities and agent memory strategies as part of the platform.
• Guide engineering teams. Lead architecture discussions, review code and designs, mentor engineers and help teams resolve technical blockers.
• Deliver production-ready systems. Build in observability, instrumentation, scalability and resilience so other teams can operate and extend the platform confidently.

EXPERIENCE & WORKING ARRANGEMENTS

What we are looking for

• 8+ years in software engineering and at least 3-4 years at Staff, Principal or Platform Architect level. Principal Backend Engineers with broad architectural ownership are also welcome.
• Java as your primary working language, with deep knowledge of the Java ecosystem, JVM performance, concurrency and service design. Micronaut or Spring Boot is strongly preferred.
• Strong distributed systems and AWS experience: event-driven architecture, REST / GraphQL APIs, data modeling, caching at scale and asynchronous messaging with Kafka or a comparable technology.
• Practical experience with modern LLM systems: designing, evaluating or building AI-powered solutions, with concrete projects you can discuss. Experience extending beyond prompt engineering is essential.
• Cross-team technical leadership: establishing architecture standards, explaining trade-offs and influencing decisions across an engineering organization of comparable scale.
• Active production coding and the ability to work independently in a distributed team, with fluent written and spoken English for technical and business discussions.

Additional experience we value

Rust experience is particularly valued and will be discussed during the architecture interview, including migration considerations. Further advantages include agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval and memory architectures, GraalVM Native Images, JVM profiling, Kubernetes, Helm, production Amazon EKS, service mesh, and high-scale subscription or e-commerce products. A university degree is not required.

Location, time zone & working hours

Format: fully remote, with candidates based outside the United States. Eastern Europe is a priority region. The team uses Scrum and asynchronous communication.

Schedule: fixed daily working hours aligned with the US team; shifting the schedule is not available. The company-provided reference is 14:00-22:00 in Georgia (UTC+4).

The briefing also lists 06:00-14:00 in US time without naming the US time zone. The exact US reference zone and any daylight-saving adjustments need confirmation during the HR interview.

Travel: no business travel is currently planned.

Compensation & benefits

An annual performance bonus of 10% of annual salary may be awarded based on the performance review and yearly KPIs.

15 paid vacation days; 4 Wellness Days Off; 14 public holidays. 5 paid sick days per year; and 3 days of bereavement leave.