PLEASE NOTE THIS ROLE IS FOR OVERSEAS APPLICATION, NON-U.S. ONLY. NO DOMESTIC (U.S.) APPLICATIONS WILL BE CONSIDERED.
Principal Platform Architect
About the Role:
Scentbird is scaling fast – across ecommerce, subscriptions, personalization, and a growing portfolio of brands. Our platform powers everything we build, and we're looking for a Principal Platform Architect to shape its evolution while helping drive AI-enabled capabilities across the engineering organization. Our goal is to scale the business through technology and AI without proportional growth in engineering headcount.
This is a senior hands-on technical leadership role reporting to the Director of Engineering. You'll own platform architecture, establish engineering standards, guide cross-team technical decisions, and identify opportunities where AI can improve engineering productivity, operational efficiency, and business outcomes.
You'll lead a small platform team while remaining deeply involved in system design, architecture, and implementation. We are looking for someone who thinks in systems, writes excellent code, and has practical experience applying modern AI technologies to solve real business problems.
What You'll Be Responsible For:
- Platform Ownership: Own platform architecture and AI enablement across the company — defining service boundaries, integration patterns, shared infrastructure components, and the standards other teams build against.
- System Design & Architecture: Lead the design of platform services — APIs, data contracts, async messaging patterns, and foundational components that span the engineering organization.
- AI-Native Engineering: Identify, prioritize, and implement AI opportunities that measurably improve engineering productivity, operational efficiency, customer experience, or business outcomes. Design and implement AI-augmented workflows — including agent orchestration pipelines, agent skill/tooling integration, and memory management strategies — as a first-class part of our platform.
- Cross-Team Standards: You will serve as the primary architectural authority for platform-level technical decisions and help shape the long-term technical direction of the company.
- Team Leadership: Directly manage and mentor the platform team (2 engineers) — setting direction, running reviews, unblocking, and growing their technical capabilities.
- Operational Readiness: Ensure the systems you design are production-ready — instrumented, scalable, fault-tolerant, and operable by the teams who inherit them.
What We'll Love About You:
- You think in tradeoffs, not absolutes — and you can articulate why clearly
- You write code that others are glad they inherited
- You bring architectural conviction without ego: you can defend a design and also let a better idea win
- You're fluent in English and can communicate complex technical concepts clearly — written and verbal — to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- You're self-directed, async-comfortable, and thrive in a distributed team environment
- Russian language skills are a plus — part of our team communicates in Russian
What You'll Need to Have (Required Qualifications):
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3–4 years in a principal, staff, or platform architecture role
- Deep, demonstrable expertise in Java — including modern JVM performance, concurrency, and service design; experience with Micronaut or Spring Boot strongly preferred
- Proven architectural breadth: distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API design (REST/GraphQL), service mesh, and cloud-native patterns on AWS
- AI-Powered Systems Experience: Hands-on experience designing, evaluating, or building AI-powered systems using modern LLM technologies. Experience with agent orchestration frameworks, tool integration, retrieval systems, or memory architectures is strongly preferred.
- Strong understanding of data modeling, async messaging (Kafka or similar), and caching strategies at scale
- Experience setting and enforcing cross-team architectural standards — not just building things yourself, but shaping how others build
- Excellent English communication skills — written and verbal — sufficient to lead technical conversations, write design proposals, and collaborate with a distributed team
- Timezone availability: minimum 4 hours of daily overlap with New York (ET)
Nice to Have (Optional Qualifications):
- Experience with Rust (not mandatory, but valued)
- Familiarity with GraalVM native images and JVM profiling
- Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and production EKS environments
- Background in ecommerce, subscription platforms, or high-scale consumer products
- Russian language proficiency
What You'll Love About Us:
- Competitive base compensation
- Bonus program
- Paid Time Off
- Wellness Days Off
- A focused, senior team that moves fast and trusts you to own your domain
- Real platform scope — you'll shape how the platform evolves, not just execute tickets
About Scentbird
Scentbird inspires fragrance lovers to go beyond the ordinary and sample scents that evoke passion, confidence, and the unknown. Our mission is to revolutionize the way we perfume by bringing the ultimate fragrance playground right to your fingertips and offering a digital subscription service that lets members choose from over 1000+ designer perfumes each month.
About the Brands:
- Scentbird: The easiest way for fragrance lovers to discover, try, and buy their favorite scented products without a commitment
- Deck of Scarlet: Deck of Scarlet is on a mission to break the clean category, redefining what clean fragrances should smell like. Composed entirely of vegan, cruelty-free ingredients, our fragrances bridge the gap between the clean and luxury categories, using the highest eau de parfum concentrations housed in sculptural, eye-catching bottles. You shouldn’t have to choose between being luxe and refined, or clean and vegan—now, you don’t have to.
- Confessions Of A Rebel: We were born in 2018, holding fast to the idea that the fragrance industry was in dire need of a change. When we looked around, all we saw was a sea of sameness: outdated archetypes of femininity and masculinity paired with unrelatable images of luxury that we had no say in. In truth, we are complex in ways that cannot be contained in the traditional heteronormative stereotypes, existing beyond the binary with raw, unfiltered voices that deserve to be heard.
- Goodhabit: Enriched with a blend of essential oils, Goodhabit’s clean, vegan, cruelty-free fragrances act as bottled intentions you set free with each mist. Our scents are designed to help you align with the good habits you’re building, while working to enhance and boost your mood. Inhale, exhale, and let the good energy flow through you.
- Sanctuary: Created for those who care about the fate of our planets, Sanctuary offers fragrance for a better future. Our clean, community-driven fragrances are inspired by endangered species and their habitats, each aimed at raising money and awareness for the preservation of their namesake.
- Drift: Drift began as an alternative to all of the tacky air care products on the market. Our products are designed to blend in, with amazing scents that stand out. We take pride in our fragrances, keeping them free from the traditional chemicals used in the fragrance industry. We are always phthalate and paraben free. We never skimp on quality of our scents or the products that deliver them. Our design ethos is simple but effective. We love our community, those who won’t settle for ordinary, and we want to deliver a best in class experience.
Scentbird is committed to bringing individuals from different backgrounds and perspectives into the Nest. We strive to uphold an inclusive environment where individuals of all different backgrounds, ages, colors, ethnicities, gender, or gender identities, genetics, physical or mental abilities, protected veteran status, race, religious or sexual orientation, thrive. We respect the laws enforced by the EEOC and are dedicated internally to going above and beyond in fostering diversity. Come as you are - we’re excited to meet you.
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