Principal Platform Architect - AI-Driven Systems Leader

Rainfall Ventures; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Scentbird is seeking a Principal Platform Architect to shape the evolution of our AI-enabled platform. You will own platform architecture, define standards, and guide cross-team decisions while leading a small platform team.

You will write code, design scalable systems, and apply modern AI technologies to improve productivity, operations, and business outcomes. Timezone overlap with New York is required.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, with 3–4 years in principal/platform architecture.
• Deep expertise in Java, modern JVM performance, concurrency, and service design.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API design.
• Hands-on AI-powered systems experience with LLMs, agent orchestration, or memory architectures.
• Strong data modeling, async messaging (Kafka), and caching at scale.
• Ability to set and enforce cross-team architectural standards.
• Excellent English communication, written and verbal.
• Timezone overlap with New York (ET).

Responsibilities

• Own platform architecture and AI enablement across the company.
• Lead design of platform services — APIs, data contracts, messaging, and core components.
• Identify and implement AI opportunities to improve productivity, operations, and outcomes.
• Establish cross-team standards and shape long-term technical direction.
• Directly manage and mentor the platform team (2 engineers).
• Ensure production-ready, scalable, fault-tolerant systems.

Skills

Java / JVM

Micronaut / Spring Boot

Distributed systems

API design REST/GraphQL

Kafka

AI-powered systems

Memory architectures

Cross-team architecture

English communication

AWS / Cloud

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

EKS

GraalVM

JVM profiling

Rust

Job description

Scentbird is seeking a Principal Platform Architect to shape the evolution of our AI-enabled platform. You will own platform architecture, define standards, and guide cross-team decisions while leading a small platform team.

You will write code, design scalable systems, and apply modern AI technologies to improve productivity, operations, and business outcomes. Timezone overlap with New York is required.