Platform Architect & Hands-On Tech Leader (Remote)

Toptal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Part time

Job summary

Toptal seeks a Principal Engineer, Platform to lead architectural ownership for federal and AI-native platforms. This remote-first role involves occasional in-person work in New York City and aims to evolve into broader engineering leadership.

You will mentor engineers, drive scalable design, and collaborate with security and product teams to deliver production-grade systems across complex environments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in startup or high-growth environments.
• Proven track record designing and scaling complex distributed systems.
• Experience working across both legacy and greenfield development.
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience in or with cybersecurity, compliance, or regulated environments.
• Demonstrated ability to make and own high-stakes architectural decisions.
• Strong communication skills with senior technical and business stakeholders.
• Willingness to be hands-on and deeply involved in implementation.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive long-term technical architecture across multiple products, creating a shared backend platform and frontends.
• Find, extract, and transform services from legacy products into shared platform components.
• Ensure scalability, performance, and security in a federally regulated environment.
• Partner with cybersecurity and compliance teams to align with FedRAMP, NIST RMF frameworks.
• Extract AI services from AI products into the shared platform.
• Ensure production-ready architecture across platforms and applications.
• Make high-impact decisions in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.
• Improve developer productivity via tooling, automation, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Act as a trusted advisor to executive leadership on technical strategy.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Hands-on leadership

Mentorship

Architectural decisions

Cross-functional

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Toptal seeks a Principal Engineer, Platform to lead architectural ownership for federal and AI-native platforms. This remote-first role involves occasional in-person work in New York City and aims to evolve into broader engineering leadership.

You will mentor engineers, drive scalable design, and collaborate with security and product teams to deliver production-grade systems across complex environments.