Architect in platform

Scentbird is scaling fast – across ecommerce, subscriptions, personalization, and a growing portfolio of brands. Our platform powers everything we build, and we're looking for a Staff Platform Architect to shape its evolution while helping drive AI-enabled capabilities across the engineering organization. Our goal is to scale the business through technology and AI without proportional growth in engineering headcount.

• Own platform architecture and AI enablement across the company — defining service boundaries, integration patterns, shared infrastructure components, and the standards other teams build against.
• Lead the design of platform services — APIs, data contracts, async messaging patterns, and foundational components that span the engineering organization.
• Identify, prioritize, and implement AI opportunities that measurably improve engineering productivity, operational efficiency, customer experience, or business outcomes.
• Design and implement AI-augmented workflows — including agent orchestration pipelines, agent skill/tooling integration, and memory management strategies — as a first-class part of our platform.
• You will serve as the primary architectural authority for platform-level technical decisions and help shape the long-term technical direction of the company.
• Directly manage and mentor the platform team (2 engineers) — setting direction, running reviews, unblocking, and growing their technical capabilities.
• Ensure the systems you design are production-ready — instrumented, scalable, fault-tolerant, and operable by the teams who inherit them.

• You think in tradeoffs, not absolutes — and you can articulate why clearly
• You write code that others are glad they inherited
• You bring architectural conviction without ego: you can defend a design and also let a better idea win
• You're fluent in English and can communicate complex technical concepts clearly — written and verbal — to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• You're self-directed, async-comfortable, and thrive in a distributed team environment
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3–4 years in a principal, staff, or platform architecture role
• Deep, demonstrable expertise in Java — including modern JVM performance, concurrency, and service design; experience with Micronaut or Spring Boot strongly preferred
• Proven architectural breadth: distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API design (REST/GraphQL), service mesh, and cloud-native patterns on AWS
• AI-Powered Systems Experience: 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 is strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, async messaging (Kafka or similar), and caching strategies at scale
• Experience setting and enforcing cross-team architectural standards — not just building things yourself, but shaping how others build
• Excellent English communication skills — written and verbal — sufficient to lead technical conversations, write design proposals, and collaborate with a distributed team
• Timezone availability: minimum 4 hours of daily overlap with New York (ET)
• Будет плюсом: Russian language skills are a plus — part of our team communicates in Russian; Experience with Rust (not mandatory, but valued); Familiarity with GraalVM native images and JVM profiling; Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and production EKS environments; Background in ecommerce, subscription platforms, or high-scale consumer products; Russian language proficiency

• Competitive base compensation
• Bonus program
• Paid Time Off
• Wellness Days Off
• A focused, senior team that moves fast and trusts you to own your domain
• Real platform scope — you'll shape how the platform evolves, not just execute tickets