Engineering Architect

What you'll own

Technical direction for a swarm that ships working software every 5 days. System design, integration strategy, data architecture, infrastructure decisions. You make the calls that keep pulse cycles clean and prevent rework from compounding.

How we work

Critical Propulsion amplifies human delivery. Our swarm model pairs 3-4 senior operators with AI agents to cut cycle times 30-50% and multiply effective capacity 2-5x versus traditional teams. Zero handoffs. Single timezone. No offshore blended teams. No sprint theater.

Week 1 is productive delivery, not onboarding. We define outcomes and trust operators to get there.

What we expect

• You've built enough systems to know where the bodies are buried, and you keep the team from digging new graves.
• You make architecture decisions that hold up under 5-day delivery pressure. No ivory-tower design that falls apart when operators start building.
• You work cross-functionally. You're not siloed into "backend" or "cloud" or "data." You have real capability awareness across data engineering, cloud infrastructure, and application architecture, and you know how decisions in one domain ripple through the others.
• You embrace agentic development. You don't treat AI as autocomplete. You delegate real work to AI agents, review their output critically, and iterate fast. You see this as the future of how software gets built, not a novelty.
• You work effectively with AI agents as part of your workflow. You know which decisions to delegate and which ones require human judgment.
• You communicate directly. If a technical direction is wrong, you say so with a better option, not a committee.
• You're a contributing architect. You set technical direction and you build. You write production code alongside the swarm, not just diagrams and decision docs. You don't have to be the fastest engineer on the team, but you ship working software every cycle like everyone else.
• You operate autonomously. No status meetings that could be a message. No decks that could be a decision.
  
  

What we don't filter on

• Years of experience as a number. If you can set technical direction for a swarm shipping in 5-day pulse cycles, the number is irrelevant.
• Specific platforms or cloud certifications as prerequisites. We care about architectural judgment and pattern recognition, not vendor badges.
• Pedigree. No school or company name substitutes for demonstrated ability to design systems that work under real load.
  
  

Nice to have

• Deep experience with Azure cloud services, including infrastructure-as-code, networking, and platform services in production.
• Experience designing and building data platforms, pipelines, or analytics infrastructure. You've made decisions about storage, orchestration, transformation, and delivery at scale using tools like Azure Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks, dbt, or equivalent.
• Fluency in Python, Node.js, or TypeScript at a systems level, not just application code.
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI tooling: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot Workspace, or similar. Even better if you've shaped how a team uses these tools, not just used them yourself.
• Experience building or consuming AI APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent). You've designed systems where AI is a first-class component, not a bolt-on.
• Comfort with spec-driven design. You've written specs that operators can build from in a single pulse cycle without ambiguity or rework loops.
• Background in consulting or client-facing delivery. You've made architecture decisions with a client in the room, not just an internal stakeholder.
• Prior experience on small, autonomous teams. You've set direction for a 3-4 person crew, not managed a 15-person org chart.
  
  

What you get

• A team where everyone builds. No layers of management between you and the work.
• AI agents as real teammates. You'll shape how the swarm uses AI tooling, not just consume it.
• Pulse cycles that create natural rhythm without traditional sprint overhead (KT +75%, Rework +60%, Mgmt +45% in typical sprint models).
• Direct client impact. Your architecture decisions show up in production within days, not quarters.
• Competitive comp
  
  

How to apply

Send us something that shows how you think about systems. A design doc, an architecture decision record, a write-up of a hard technical call you made. Skip the cover letter unless you actually want to write one.

Let's have a real conversation. No fluff.