Calling All Upstarters!

SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT WANTED!

We are Upstart 13. We are humble, hungry, and competent people who are radically changing the expectations and experience of outsourcing for all participants by challenging barriers that create inequality and by bringing down borders in technology for people everywhere. We’re all about delivering value and doing big things. We have become a game changer for teams around the world who look to Upstart’s services as a differentiator.

Job Description

We are seeking a highly skilled Solutions Architect to join our team and lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and high‑impact technical solutions across a variety of platforms and business domains. This role is both strategic and hands‑on, requiring someone who can define architecture at a high level while also diving deep into technical details to ensure solutions are practical, reliable, and aligned with long‑term technology direction.

This role bridges pre-sales and delivery, ensuring that the solutions we commit to clients are ones we can actually build. You will collaborate closely with sales, engineering, product, and leadership teams to shape technical strategy, guide architectural decisions, and mentor developers through complex problem‑solving. While this is not a people‑management role, it is ideal for someone who enjoys influencing technical direction, elevating engineering maturity, and owning architecture from concept through delivery.

Responsibilities

Define and Develop Architectural Strategy:

Create detailed architecture, blueprints, system designs, and long‑term technical roadmaps.

Establish architectural standards, best practices, and reference patterns.

Design scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems and integrations.

Evaluate trade‑offs between scalability, security, cost, performance, and maintainability.

Define long‑term system evolution and modernization strategies.

Cloud & Infrastructure Leadership:

Architect and optimize cloud or hybrid infrastructures, including networking, IAM/RBAC, compute, storage, monitoring, and security.

Define best practices for resource organization, security posture, governance, and cost optimization.

Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, resilience, and scalable configurations.

Guide Infrastructure‑as‑Code and automation strategies (e.g., Terraform, Biceps, Cloudformation, Pulumi, native IaC tools).

DevOps, Automation & Delivery Enablement:

Lead adoption and optimization of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.

Define deployment strategies, release workflows, and environment management.

Promote automation, performance monitoring, observability, and operational excellence.

Support engineering teams in debugging, incident resolution, and performance improvements.

Hands‑On Technical Contribution:

Contribute directly to architecture, critical code components, or prototypes.

Participate in code reviews, design reviews, and complex technical troubleshooting.

Support performance tuning, optimization, and architectural refactoring.

Validate the feasibility of architectural designs through hands‑on collaboration.

Pre-Sales & Delivery Transition:

Partner with Sales and Customer Success during the pre-sales cycle to assess technical feasibility, shape solution approaches, and validate delivery commitments before contract close.

Participate in discovery conversations and proposal development, acting as the technical voice in client-facing discussions.

Ensure a clean handoff into delivery by carrying full context from pre-sales into Sprint 0, eliminating the cold-start problem for new engagements.

AI & Emerging Technology Enablement:

Evaluate emerging technologies and propose how they support architectural evolution.

Support integration of AI/ML capabilities where applicable.

Assess technical implications, constraints, and opportunities created by modern architectural approaches (e.g., event‑driven systems, workflow orchestration, automation frameworks).

Team, Culture & Technical Maturity:

Identify capability gaps and opportunities for engineering growth.

Mentor and guide engineers and technical leads to elevate technical excellence.

Foster best practices, technical quality, and continuous improvement.

Influence decision‑making through expertise, credibility, and strong communication—without relying on formal authority.

Qualifications

Technical Skills:

12+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years with significant architectural responsibilities.

Proven experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production.

Strong understanding of system design fundamentals such as:

- REST APIs and service‑oriented architectures.
- EDD, TDD, Clean Architecture and SOLID.
- Messages, Queues, Bus and Event Management Systems.
- SQL, Data models and Databases.
- Knowledge about IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
- Security, governance, observability, and resilience.

Experience leading technical design across large‑scale or mission‑critical systems.

Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps best practices

Strong familiarity with Cloud environments (Any), modern engineering practices, and industry standards.

Soft Skills:

Ability to set technical direction and influence architectural decisions.

Strong analytical and systems‑thinking mindset.

Pragmatic problem‑solving skills with a strategic perspective.

Excellent communication across technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

High ownership, proactivity, and comfort working in evolving environments.

Curiosity and openness to emerging technologies and innovative solutions.

Bonus Skills:

Experience modernizing legacy systems or scaling high‑transaction platforms.

Exposure to cloud‑native, containerized, or microservices‑oriented environments.

Experience implementing workflow orchestration, task automation, or event‑driven architectures.

AI/ML integration experience or familiarity with modern AI frameworks.

Professional cloud certifications or architecture‑related credentials.

Why Upstart13?

We put people first at Upstart 13! We believe the world is filled with amazing people and we are willing to go to great lengths to seek out others who share our values to join our cause of bringing down borders in technology for people everywhere.
We develop leaders at Upstart 13, we focus on what matters to do meaningful work, we own our shit, we stay curious, and we understand responsibility leads to giving. We do big things together!

Perks: