Software Architect

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps.
Our partner is looking for a Software Architect based in Portugal.
This is a high-impact architecture role focused on shaping how a large, distributed engineering organization builds and evolves its platform.
You will be the first dedicated Architect, providing cross-cutting technical direction without direct people management responsibilities.
The role combines deep systems thinking with hands‐on architectural work across distributed systems, APIs, data infrastructure, reliability, and scalability.
You will partner with Staff and Lead Engineers while working closely with Engineering leadership to drive decisions across multiple teams.
A key part of the role will be preparing the platform for continued growth, new products, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
You will also establish durable architecture practices, strengthen technical standards, and help teams move quickly while maintaining consistency and reliability.
Accountabilities: Build and maintain a comprehensive view of the platform architecture, including data flows, service boundaries, ownership areas, and dependencies, keeping the architecture current as the organization evolves.
Identify systemic scalability, reliability, performance, and cost risks across the platform pipeline and drive architectural improvements before they become production incidents.
Establish direction for API design and service patterns across REST APIs, SDKs, and MCP surfaces, ensuring consistent experiences across the platform.
Shape the roadmap for foundational initiatives such as cell‐based architecture, multi‐region readiness, rate limiting, and feature flag infrastructure, while personally leading the most complex architectural designs.
Act as a full‐time technical leader across the engineering organization by setting priorities, driving architecture decisions to completion, maintaining decision records, and following through on adoption.
Partner with Engineering leadership and Staff/Lead Engineers to prioritize cross‐cutting technical initiatives and align them with individual team roadmaps.
Mentor Staff‐level engineers in system design, technical writing, architectural thinking, and influence.
Strengthen existing design review processes, including RFCs and cross-team design reviews, making them consistent, lightweight, and valuable for engineering teams.
Establish and extend engineering standards for observability, quality, security‐by‐design, API evolution, and versioning in collaboration with platform, security, and product teams.
Review and approve critical architectural designs while using the review process as an opportunity to develop engineering capability rather than create unnecessary gatekeeping.
Translate business growth, enterprise requirements, new product launches, and AI/MCP workflows into multi‐quarter technical strategy and investment priorities.
Advise Engineering and executive leadership on build‐versus‐buy decisions, platform investments, and technical risks using clear business‐oriented communication.
Lead the adoption of AI within engineering practices by establishing approaches for AI‐assisted design, coding, review, architecture, and documentation.
Stay hands‐on when needed by developing prototypes, reference implementations, technical documentation, and investigating complex production issues.
Requirements:
10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years operating as an Architect within an engineering organization of 100+ people, with ownership of platform‐level architecture rather than an individual service.
Proven ability to lead through influence, including guiding senior engineers without direct authority, facilitating architecture or design‐review forums, and driving adoption of technical standards across teams.
Deep expertise in distributed systems and high‐throughput, low‐latency backend architecture, with experience in Go or a similar systems programming language, Kubernetes, AWS, event‐driven systems, and data‐intensive architectures.
Broad technical understanding across adjacent layers such as client SDKs, data pipelines, and machine learning serving environments.
Strong experience designing public APIs and SDKs at scale, including API versioning, backward compatibility, and consistency across multiple interfaces.
Demonstrated ability to anticipate systemic technical risks and proactively address them before they result in failures or incidents.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical decisions understandable to both engineers and executive stakeholders.
Strong preference for asynchronous and documented decision‐making, with experience producing clear technical documentation and durable architectural records.
Practical expe