As a Distributed Systems Architect at Gather AI, you will serve as a technical anchor for the engineering organization, setting technical direction and architecture for mature, complex SaaS systems. You will align backend, frontend, platform, and infrastructure decisions into a coherent enterprise-grade architecture, retire scalability and reliability debt, and drive high-level decisions on testing and system design. You will also modernize and scale production systems using database-level strategies and platform primitives, and mentor senior talent across the team.

Responsibilities

Own Architecture: Align backend, frontend, platform, and infrastructure decisions into a coherent, enterprise-grade architecture.
Reflect Excellence: Replace "firefighting" with predictable execution. You will lead the effort to retire scalability and reliability debt, safely upgrade critical infrastructure, and reduce single-threaded dependencies.
Set Direction: Set the standard for engineering technical hygiene. You will drive high-level decisions on testing strategies, validation guardrails, and system design concerns that directly impact delivery speed and maintainability.
Evolve Systems: Modernize and scale existing production systems by applying database-level strategies (schema evolution, replication tradeoffs) and platform primitives (orchestration, runtime constraints) as architectural tools.
Mentor: Elevate the organization by establishing shared practices, aligning terminology, and mentoring senior talent across the engineering team.
Exhibit First-Principles Thinking: Establish a deep understanding of data systems, latency-sensitive services, and failure modes.

Requirements

Distributed Systems: Mastery of performance-sensitive REST APIs, caching strategies, and core distributed systems concepts.
Relational Data Systems: Expert-level PostgreSQL (upgrades, query tuning, replication tradeoffs, and schema evolution) and advanced SQL.
Cloud & Containers: Deep experience with Azure and/or AWS and production-grade Kubernetes/Docker.
Backend Development: Strong production experience in Node.js and/or Python.
Reliability & Security: Hands-on experience with Observability (logs, metrics, traces), CI/CD, SRE fundamentals (SLIs/SLOs), and security hygiene (IAM, secrets management).

Nice to have

Domain Expertise: Experience in logistics, warehouse systems, or robotics-adjacent platforms is a plus, but not required. We value your ability to apply sound architectural judgment to new problem spaces.
Future Scale: If you have operated at a slightly smaller scale but can reason clearly about "what breaks next" (e.g., multi-regional architectures or advanced data governance), we will help you bridge that gap.
Organizational Maturity: While we value experience driving org-wide standards, we don't expect perfection on day one. We look for the intent to elevate our shared practices as you build trust.
AI-Ready: At Gather, we are at the leading edge of both applied classical ML and next-gen LLM/VLM AI. Come prepared to work with the latest and greatest tooling.