The architect will define technical direction, assess system risks, and establish engineering standards for complex web applications. They will also lead a team of engineers, manage project delivery, and maintain hands-on involvement in critical production code.
Job Overview
We are looking for a hands-on software engineer with years of experience building complex web applications, who has led teams through delivery and is comfortable making decisions across disparate technologies. You have deep skill in either backend or frontend engineering and are genuinely conversant in the other, enough to review the work, spot the risk, and make the call when the two sides disagree.
Required
Core Tasks
1. Architecture and technical direction
Assess the current system — codebase, data model, infrastructure, dependencies — and produce a written architecture assessment with prioritized risks.
Define the target architecture for [project scope], including service boundaries, data flow, integration points, and the migration path from where the system is today.
Make and document the technology decisions the project depends on, with tradeoffs stated. Where the decision is reversible, say so; where it is not, make the case explicitly.
Set the engineering standards the team works to: code review expectations, testing strategy, branching and release process, definition of done.
2.Hands-on delivery
Write production code on the critical path — [expected split, e.g., roughly 50–60% of your time is hands-on].
Take the hardest or highest-risk pieces yourself: the parts where a wrong call early is expensive to unwind.
Review the team's work and hold the quality bar without becoming the bottleneck.
Own the deployment pipeline and release process for the duration of the engagement.
3.Team leadership
Lead a team of engineers (contract and/or in-house), including [e.g., the project-based backend engineer, frontend contractors, QA].
Break the scope into work that can be assigned, sequenced, and tracked; keep the team unblocked.
Run the working rhythm: standups, planning, retrospectives, or whatever cadence fits a team this size.
Mentor as you go — the team should be more capable of maintaining this system at the end of the engagement than at the start.
4. Project management and stakeholder communication
Own the delivery plan: estimates, sequencing, dependencies, and the critical path.
Report status to leadership on a weekly cadence — what shipped, what slipped, what is at risk, and what decision you need from them.
Raise scope, timeline, and resourcing risks early and in writing, with options rather than just problems.
Translate between technical constraints and business tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders.
Deliverables
Architecture assessment and target-state design document, reviewed and approved by project lead.
Delivery plan with milestones, estimates, dependencies, and named owners.
Architecture decision records for the significant technology choices made during the engagement.
Working, production-deployed software within the agreed scope, built by you and the team you lead.
Weekly written status reports across the engagement.
Handoff package: system documentation, operational runbook, known limitations, recommended next phase of work, and a walkthrough with the team that will maintain it.
Must Haves
5+ years of development and project management experience
Project management — you have owned a delivery timeline, not just a backlog, and have brought a project in against a date.
Team management — experience leading engineers day to day: assigning work, reviewing it, unblocking people, and having the direct conversation when something is off track.
Python — production experience building and maintaining backend services.
TypeScript — production experience on the frontend and/or in Node services.
SQL — fluent in writing, reading, and optimizing queries; comfortable reasoning about schema design and query performance.
API development — you have designed APIs that other teams or customers consumed, and you know what makes them painful to consume.
Nice To Haves
Domain experience in medical software and/or e-commerce.
Familiarity with the regulatory and privacy constraints that come with HIPAA / PCI / other environments.
Cloud infrastructure experience on AWS / GCP / Azure, including CI/CD and managed databases.
Prior contract or consulting work where you owned a scope end to end and delivered it without close supervision.
How we will work together
You report to the project lead and are the single technical point of accountability for this engagement.
Written status update at the close of each week; sync with leadership.
You have decision authority over technology choices, sequencing, code standards, decisions on etc
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