Senior Core Systems Architect

Userpilot; Ireland; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Userpilot, Ireland, seeks a Senior individual-contributor engineer to own how the large distributed system fits together, handle load, and recover from outages. You will shape technical direction, review architectures, and guide application squads while working with Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS in an AI-native stack.

You’ll be the go-to expert for incident response, system observability, and scalable infrastructure, helping teams ship safely and at pace.

Qualifications

• Senior experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Strong software-engineering and CS fundamentals across data structures and algorithms.
• Architectural judgment with explicit tradeoffs in durability, extensibility, robustness, observability, and scalability.
• Demonstrated incident response and root-cause analysis under pressure.
• Hands-on infrastructure with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
• Observability and alerting using Grafana, Prometheus, and CloudWatch.
• Clear communication and influence across multiple teams.
• Experience with AI-native workflows and agent-assisted development.

Responsibilities

• Lead system design for cross-cutting, high-risk work and shepherd ADRs.
• Collaborate with squads to convert product requirements into durable, scalable designs.
• Own production reliability: monitoring, alerting, and on-call practices.
• Be first on incidents: diagnose, fix, and postmortem with preventive changes.
• Design, provision, and operate infrastructure on AWS with Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines and validation gates for trustworthy changes.
• Write ADRs and runbooks to document architecture and operational constraints.
• Mentor engineers and raise the architectural bar across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

System design

CS fundamentals

Architectural judgment

Incident response

Terraform

Kubernetes

AWS

Observability

AI tooling

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

AWS

Grafana

Prometheus

CloudWatch

Job description

Userpilot, Ireland, seeks a Senior individual-contributor engineer to own how the large distributed system fits together, handle load, and recover from outages. You will shape technical direction, review architectures, and guide application squads while working with Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS in an AI-native stack.

You’ll be the go-to expert for incident response, system observability, and scalable infrastructure, helping teams ship safely and at pace.