Principal Architect

Principal Architect

Location: Fully Remote, United States

Job Description:

Principal Architect – Empower the Future of Travel with Blockskye

Blockskye is transforming corporate travel and entertainment with next-generation blockchain-powered booking, payment, and expense solutions. By connecting suppliers and corporate buyers through cutting-edge technology, we drive transparency, trust, and efficiency in travel management. Backed by industry-leading partners in booking technology, airlines, and innovative payment solutions, we are shaping the future of the industry.

 

About the Team:

Our technology team operates with a clear mission: Build with trust. Navigate with purpose. Launch with pride. We’re guided by core tenets: Curiosity, Discipline, Excellence, Thoughtfulness, and Intent, and believe that great technology is built by people who ask “why,” care deeply about outcomes, and never settle for “good enough.” Every line of code, every deployment, and every retrospective is a chance to raise the bar, for ourselves and for the industry.

 

Blockskye is seeking a thoughtful, AI-forward Software Architect to design and guide the development of scalable, high-performance, AI-native systems that power our next-generation travel and expense infrastructure. In this role, you’ll work closely with engineering leads and product stakeholders to define architecture — including LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration — improve system reliability, and ensure technical consistency across projects.

 

You’ll play a critical role in shaping both the structure of our platform and the standards by which we build it, balancing long-term technical vision with pragmatic delivery. The ideal candidate has a strong background in modern web architectures on AWS and polyglot fluency across backend languages, hands-on fluency in modern AI engineering (LLMs, RAG, agents, evals), demonstrates deep systems thinking, and is comfortable operating across multiple teams.

 

We value engineers who prioritize clarity, maintainability, and simplicity — and who enjoy mentoring others while leading by example. Excellent fluency in oral and written English is essential for collaborating across our remote-first team.

 

Responsibilities:

• Hands-on coding solving complex problems.
• Design and evolve the overall software architecture for Blockskye’s core platform, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and performance across services.
• Define and evolve the architecture for Blockskye’s AI systems — model selection, prompt orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, agent patterns, evals, guardrails, observability, and cost/latency management.
• Architect for responsible AI: data governance for LLM workflows, PII handling, prompt-injection and hallucination defenses, and auditable decision trails for AI-assisted travel, payments, and expense transactions.
• Lead the team’s adoption of AI-augmented engineering — setting standards for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and agentic development workflows, and embedding them into architectural reviews and delivery.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership and product stakeholders to translate business goals into robust technical solutions.
• Define and enforce coding standards, architectural patterns, and system design best practices across engineering teams.
• Provide hands-on guidance and mentorship to developers during system design, implementation, and code reviews
• Lead architectural decision-making for major new initiatives, integrations, and platform enhancements.
• Evaluate and select tools, frameworks, and third-party solutions aligned with business and technical requirements.
• Partner with DevOps and Infrastructure teams to ensure highly available, secure, and observable cloud-native systems (primarily in AWS).
• Create and maintain technical documentation for architecture diagrams, workflows, and system dependencies.
• Contribute to system reliability and performance by identifying and resolving bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or architectural debt.
• Participate in early-stage technical scoping and estimation for roadmap initiatives.
• Drive the adoption of modern development practices such as microservices, event-driven architecture, and CI/CD.
• Review and guide API design (REST, Webhooks, etc.) to ensure clean, consistent, and versioned interfaces across teams and external partners.
• Help facilitate cross-team architectural alignment and knowledge sharing through regular design reviews and technical discussions.
• Support compliance, security, and data governance requirements from an architectural perspective (e.g., data flow diagrams, access controls).
• Stay current with emerging technologies, tools, and architectural patterns to inform long-term platform evolution.
• Serve as a key thought partner in Blockskye’s transition from a startup architecture to an enterprise-grade platform.

 

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred
• 8+ years of progressive experience in software development, including at least 2–3 years in an architecture or senior technical leadership role
• Polyglot fluency across backend languages and modern web frameworks (e.g., Node.js, Python, PHP/Laravel, Go), with the ability to become productive quickly in unfamiliar stacks
• Hands-on experience architecting production LLM-powered systems against at least one frontier model provider (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI), with solid command of prompt engineering, structured output, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration.
• Daily, fluent use of AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent), with a demonstrated ability to define and teach standards for their safe, effective use across a team — including agentic workflows for real engineering work, not just autocomplete.
• Working knowledge of AI system evaluation (offline evals, A/B testing of prompts and models), guardrails for hallucinations, prompt injection, and PII, cost and latency management, and AI observability in production.
• Strong understanding of software architecture patterns, including microservices, event-driven systems, and domain-driven design
• Demonstrated experience designing scalable, cloud-native systems, particularly on AWS (e.g., Lambda, RDS, S3, ECS/Fargate)
• Proficiency in designing and maintaining secure, maintainable, and well-documented RESTful APIs and system interfaces
• Strong working knowledge of databases, including MySQL and caching strategies (e.g., Redis), with experience in query optimization and data modeling
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tools (e.g., CloudWatch, Datadog, Sentry)
• Ability to translate business requirements into high-level system designs and detailed technical specifications
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, lead cross-functional technical discussions, and drive consensus
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with fluency in written and spoken English for remote collaboration
• Comfort operating in a remote-first, startup-to-scaleup environment with evolving systems and priorities
• A collaborative mindset and a strong sense of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with blockchain technologies, smart contracts, or distributed ledger integrations
• Background in travel, fintech, or enterprise SaaS platforms
• Experience modernizing legacy systems or leading platform migrations
• Familiarity with WebSockets, GraphQL, or message queue systems (e.g., SQS, Kafka)
• Experience fine-tuning, distilling, or post-training models, or building custom eval suites at scale.
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) / agent ecosystem.

Why Join Us?

At Blockskye, we are redefining corporate travel and payment through blockchain technology. By joining our team, you’ll be part of an innovative, forward-thinking company that values collaboration, operational excellence, and transformational leadership.

 

Please note, this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change or new ones may be assigned at any time with or without notice.

 

Blockskye is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, disability, or veteran status.