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.