Engineering Architect

Engineering Architect (Remote)

Salary: $230K - $250K base

Full Time / Direct-Hire

Summary:

We are hiring a hands-on

Engineering Architect

to help lead the technical evolution of a mission-critical legal platform used by law firms, corporations, and public sector organizations to manage complex legal work. This role is built for a top-tier architect who still builds — someone who enjoys solving hard systems problems while shaping the long-term technical direction of a growing enterprise platform.

This architect will operate in a dual role: driving architectural strategy across the organization while remaining deeply involved in the design and implementation of core systems. You will work directly with engineering teams on the platform’s most complex technical challenges — defining system boundaries, designing scalable services, shaping data architecture, reviewing critical code paths, and guiding teams through difficult technical tradeoffs.

Strategy/Objective:

The platform is evolving from a specialized case management product into a comprehensive legal operations platform that supports thousands of users and manages high volumes of sensitive operational data. Supporting this growth requires building systems that handle multi-tenant scale, large data workloads, complex workflow orchestration, and deep integrations with external enterprise systems.

You will play a central role in designing the long-term architecture of the platform, ensuring it remains scalable, resilient, and adaptable as the system grows in scale and complexity. This role requires someone who has personally architected and built large-scale distributed systems, influenced engineering direction across teams, and delivered platforms that support mission-critical workloads.

You will collaborate with other senior architects and engineering leaders to establish durable architectural patterns, technical standards, and platform capabilities, while remaining actively involved in building and evolving the systems that power the platform.

This role is intended for an architect who wants to shape the direction of a complex platform while remaining deeply engaged in the engineering work itself — combining strategic influence with hands-on technical leadership.

Scale \& Complexity:

The platform operates in a high-scale, high-reliability environment where legal teams depend on the system to manage active cases, documents, workflows, and operational data. Architects in this role will design systems that support large multi-tenant datasets, complex relational and event-driven workflows, high concurrency workloads, and deep integrations with third-party systems. The technical challenges span distributed services, data architecture, reliability engineering, and platform extensibility.

Technical Ownership:

This role carries true architectural ownership. The Engineering Architect is responsible for shaping system design decisions that affect the entire platform — from service boundaries and data models to scalability strategies and platform standards. While collaboration across teams is essential, this role is expected to actively design solutions, prototype approaches, review critical code paths, and guide implementation, ensuring architectural decisions are grounded in real engineering practice rather than theoretical design.

Responsibilities:

• Architectural Strategy: Design and oversee the development of high-scale, mission-critical production systems, ensuring they are modular, composable, and extensible.
• System Modernization: Drive the evolution of "legacy" systems by implementing strategic techniques to migrate them toward a modern, target-state architecture.
• Cross-Functional Translation: Act as a bridge between Engineering and non-technical stakeholders (Product, Security, Finance, etc.) to ensure business needs are reflected in technical designs.
• Documentation \& Visualization: Create clear technical documentation and complex system diagrams to communicate architectural visions across various mediums.
• Collaborative Design: Facilitate design sessions and distributed conversations, ensuring engineering teams retain ownership of their work while benefiting from expert feedback.
• Cloud \& Cost Optimization: Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), balancing high performance with cost efficiencies and regional deployment needs.
• Mentorship \& Growth: Serve as a high-level mentor to engineering teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Technology Scouting: Monitor the broader computing landscape to identify dependable current technologies and emerging trends worthy of adoption.
• It's also likely this role will have both feature and platform teams within their scope.

Qualifications:

• Proven Technical Depth: Extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a "lessons learned the hard way" mentality.
• Expert System Modeling: Advanced proficiency in high-level service design and the ability to model interfaces for long-term scalability.
• Data Layer Mastery: Deep working knowledge of various data persistence layers and a nuanced understanding of which use cases suit specific technologies.
• Public Cloud Proficiency: Significant experience with a major cloud provider (AWS preferred), including a strong grasp of its capabilities and inherent caveats.
• Communication Versatility: Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills, with the ability to tailor complex messages for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Leadership Mindset: A hospitality-focused approach to leadership, prioritizing being "of service" to the teams you support rather than exercising rigid control.
• Collaborative Agility: The ability to propose solutions and integrate critical feedback without defensiveness, maintaining a focus on the best outcome for the product.
• Domain Expertise: A proven track record as a domain expert in a specific focus area (e.g., Front-end or Data Architecture) while maintaining a broad understanding of the full stack.