Lead / Architect (PHP)

Lead / Architect (PHP) — Technical Vision & Architecture

Fully remote, US-based role (US Citizen or Green Card only).

Role Overview

The Lead Software Architect serves as the technical authority for the platform’s re-architecture and modernization. You will set architectural direction across engineering teams, translate business and product goals into scalable strategies, and mentor senior engineers to drive engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Lead the re-architecture and modernization of the core platform and technical ecosystem.
• Own overall system architecture to ensure scalability, security, reliability, and maintainability.
• Convert business objectives and product requirements into long-term technical strategies and architectural roadmaps.
• Lead complex system design work, producing architecture diagrams, models, and technical documentation.
• Drive architecture decisions across backend services, APIs, data systems, integrations, and frontend applications.
• Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, tools, and platforms.
• Run proof-of-concept initiatives to validate new approaches.

Engineering Leadership & Governance

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across multiple teams.
• Conduct architecture reviews and guide teams through complex design decisions.
• Establish and enforce coding standards, architectural principles, and engineering best practices.
• Promote software quality via code review standards and organization-wide engineering governance.
• Facilitate technical design reviews and cross-functional architectural discussions.

Software Development & Platform Engineering

• Hands-on leadership for major architectural initiatives and critical implementations.
• Help decompose large initiatives into scalable, maintainable components.
• Design and oversee distributed systems, microservices architectures, API ecosystems, and domain-driven solutions.
• Ensure requirements for performance, observability, reliability, accessibility, and security are met.
• Identify and address technical debt, architectural risks, and bottlenecks.

Data & AI Architecture

• Own data architecture strategy: database design, data modeling, ETL processes, and pipeline architecture.
• Provide guidance across relational and non-relational data platforms, including MongoDB and cloud-native solutions.
• Evaluate and implement AI/ML integration opportunities with measurable business value.

Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure

• Lead architectural decisions related to AWS.
• Collaborate with DevOps/SRE on deployment strategies, observability, operational excellence, and modernization.
• Provide guidance for containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native application design.
• Support incident response and postmortems with architectural recommendations.

Compliance & Security

• Ensure architectural and platform designs support security and compliance requirements (details truncated in the provided text).