Engineering Architect / Lead

About fileAI 

fileAI is the leading AI-native workflow automation platform and the world's only horizontal file processing agent, designed to automate complex, unstructured data workflows at scale.

About the role 

We are looking for an Engineering Architect / Lead who will own our product and platform architecture end‑to‑end, set engineering standards, and partner closely with product to drive File AI’s technical roadmap.

Role Overview

You will be the technical backbone of File AI’s product development:

• Own and evolve the overall system and product architecture across services, data, and ML components.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership to multiple engineering pods/squads.

• Raise the bar on engineering excellence: reliability, performance, security, and developer productivity.

• Work closely with Product, Design, and GTM to translate business goals into robust, scalable solutions.

This is a highly impactful role for someone who wants to build and lead, not just advise.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Direction

• Define and own the end‑to‑end architecture for File AI’s core products and platform (APIs, microservices, data pipelines, ML/AI services, storage, and integration layers).

• Create and maintain architecture roadmaps, ensuring the platform can scale in terms of users, data volume, and product complexity.

• Drive key technical decisions (build vs buy, service decomposition, tech stack choices, patterns and frameworks).

• Ensure architectural decisions align with business strategy, security, compliance, and cost efficiency.

Engineering Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across multiple teams (backend, frontend, infra, ML).

• Set and enforce engineering best practices: code quality, reviews, testing, observability, incident response, and documentation.

• Lead design reviews and RFC processes, guiding teams toward high‑quality, maintainable solutions.

• Partner with Engineering Management to shape team structures, ownership boundaries, and interfaces.

Product & Delivery

• Collaborate with Product to shape technical requirements, estimate complexity, and de‑risk ambitious initiatives.

• Lead early‑stage technical discovery and prototyping for new product bets, especially around AI/ML and new data experiences.

• Ensure technical feasibility, scalability, and performance for all major product initiatives.

• Balance long‑term architectural health with short‑term delivery needs; communicate trade‑offs clearly to stakeholders.

Platform, Reliability & Security

• Own non‑functional requirements: reliability, scalability, performance, security, privacy, and compliance.

• Guide the evolution of core platform capabilities: authentication/authorization, data access patterns, file storage, eventing, observability, configuration, and internal tooling.

• Work with DevOps/SRE to ensure robust CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and operational excellence.

• Drive security‑by‑design practices and coordinate with external auditors or partners as needed.

Qualifications

Must‑Have

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time in architect / principal / lead roles.

• Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems or cloud‑native SaaS platforms (preferably B2B).

• Strong hands‑on skills in at least one modern backend stack (e.g. TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Java, Python) and experience with modern front‑end frameworks (e.g. React).

• Solid experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern DevOps practices.

• Demonstrated ability to own complex systems, drive large cross‑team initiatives, and make clear architectural trade‑offs.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills: able to align engineers, product, and leadership around technical decisions.

Nice‑to‑Have

• Experience in AI/ML products, particularly around document/file understanding, vector search, LLMs, or data pipelines.

• Background with event‑driven architectures, microservices, and messaging systems.

• Exposure to security, compliance, and data privacy concerns in multi‑tenant SaaS.

• Experience in early‑stage or high‑growth startups, where ambiguity and rapid change are the norm.

• Prior people‑leadership (tech lead, team lead, or architect supporting multiple teams).

How We Work

• Product‑centric: We start from user impact and work backwards to systems and code.

• Pragmatic but principled: We value clean architecture and good abstractions, but we ship.

• Collaborative: Engineering, Product, and Design work as one team.

• High ownership: You will have the autonomy and responsibility to shape critical parts of the platform.

Perks & Culture

• Competitive salary and performance-based incentives.

• Health insurance, lunch perks, uncapped leave.

• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.

• Grow & learn with a fast-growing organisation.