As a Senior AI & Cloud-Native Software Architect, you will own the software and cloud-native architecture of AI-enabled applications and retrieval systems, and lead their design, build and productionization. This role combines architectural leadership with hands-on engineering and the reliability, security and observability required for production workloads.

Requirements

What you will do

1. Architectural Leadership & Strategy

Solution Design: Lead the design of scalable, secure and resilient software architectures for AI-enabled applications, defining service boundaries, data flows, APIs and integration patterns.

Cloud-Native Architecture: Define cloud-native architecture patterns across microservices, containers, serverless and event-driven systems, selecting the right compute, messaging and data services for each workload.

AI Architecture: Design reference architectures for GenAI and RAG solutions, covering model selection, retrieval strategy, data governance and tenant isolation.

Architecture Governance: Define non-functional requirements (scalability, availability, latency, cost), evaluate trade-offs against the AWS Well-Architected Framework and record decisions in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

Security by Design: Embed identity, authorization, secrets management and data protection into the architecture from the outset.

2. AI & Cloud-Native Engineering

GenAI Productionization: Productionize GenAI applications with model routing, evaluation, guardrails and cost/latency optimization.

RAG Pipelines: Build RAG pipelines covering ingestion, embeddings, vector storage, permission-aware retrieval and grounding.

Backend Services: Develop cloud-native backend services using TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python.

Event-Driven Workflows: Design event-driven workflows with queues, workers, webhooks, retries and dead-letter handling.

3. Technical Consultancy & Stakeholder Management

Business Translation: Translate business use cases into technical designs, assessments and executable backlogs.

Strategic Documentation: Produce clear technical reports, architecture assessments, findings, recommendations and executive summaries.

4. Mentorship & Hands-On Execution

Technical Ownership: Take accountability for the architecture of each engagement from discovery to go-live, keeping implementation aligned with the agreed design.

Team Guidance: Guide engineers through architecture and code reviews, and set standards for design, coding and testing.

Observability: Implement monitoring, tracing, alerting and operational runbooks.

CI/CD & Deployment: Build secure CI/CD pipelines and containerized or serverless deployments.

Job requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience ( Typescript/ Nodejs or Python)

Proven experience owning the architecture of production distributed systems (microservices, domain-driven design, REST and asynchronous APIs).

Deep knowledge of cloud-native patterns: containers and Kubernetes, serverless, event-driven and asynchronous messaging, and resilience patterns such as idempotency, circuit breakers and back-pressure.

Experience documenting architectures and decisions (C4 model, ADRs or similar), defining non-functional requirements and running trade-off analysis.

Strong understanding of identity, authorization, secrets management, network isolation and data protection in cloud-native systems.

Hands-on delivery of production GenAI or LLM applications, including evaluation and AI safety controls.

Experience with RAG, embeddings, and vector databases (pgvector, OpenSearch, or equivalent).

REST APIs, event-driven systems and third-party integrations

PostgreSQL, Redis and object storage.

Docker, CI/CD, automated testing and production troubleshooting.

LLM evaluation, prompt/version management and AI safety controls.

Observability using OpenTelemetry and platforms such as Grafana, Datadog or CloudWatch.

Nice to have

AWS: Bedrock, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions, ECS/EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB.

Conversational and contact center: WhatsApp Business API, Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex, Twilio, voice bots.

Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or equivalent.

Customer-facing consulting experience and comfort presenting to executive stakeholders.

Engagement details

Part time

Remote

Contractor Hourly

Start: ASAP