Platform Architect & Platform Engineering Lead

We are seeking a highly technical founding engineer who can help architect, build, and scale the platform from the ground up. This is not a maintenance role. This is a company-building role. You will work directly with the founder to define technical strategy, establish engineering standards, design system architecture, and lead development of core platform capabilities. You should be comfortable moving between architecture discussions, product decisions, infrastructure planning, coding, platform strategy, AI integration, marketplace economics, and team building.

Initial Responsibilities:

Platform Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Design the overall technical architecture of RushCiti
• Define platform-wide frontend, backend, mobile, AI, data, and infrastructure systems
• Establish coding standards, engineering principles, and development practices
• Make technology decisions supporting long-term scalability
• Design service boundaries, platform modules, and system interactions
• Define development roadmaps and technical milestones
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs between speed, cost, scalability, and complexity
• Ensure platform architecture supports future growth and monetization

Product Engineering & Platform Development

• Build production-ready platform capabilities across web and mobile experiences
• Develop marketplace systems, seller tools, buyer experiences, social features, creator tools, administrative systems, and internal operational tooling
• Design reusable frontend architecture, component systems, and shared platform libraries
• Build scalable APIs, backend services, and platform integrations
• Integrate third-party services, payment providers, and platform partners
• Deliver features independently from concept through deployment
• Translate product requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Collaborate on product prioritization, MVP scope definition, and release planning
• Drive execution across multiple platform initiatives while maintaining performance, usability, and reliability standards

Backend Engineering & Distributed Systems

• Design scalable backend services and platform infrastructure
• Build authentication, authorization, identity, and security systems
• Develop payment, order, inventory, messaging, notification, and workflow systems
• Design event-driven architectures and background processing systems
• Optimize databases, caching layers, and API performance
• Build highly reliable platform services supporting future scale
• Create resilient systems with fault tolerance and recovery mechanisms

Mobile Platform Engineering

• Lead architecture decisions for iOS and Android applications
• Define shared experiences between web and mobile platforms
• Ensure consistency across devices and operating systems
• Optimize performance, reliability, and user experience
• Help establish long-term mobile platform strategy

AI Systems & Intelligent Platform Features

• Integrate AI-powered experiences throughout the platform
• Build recommendation and personalization systems
• Design intelligent discovery and search capabilities
• Create conversational and assistant-based experiences
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and implementation opportunities
• Develop AI-assisted internal workflows and automation systems
• Support future AI-native commerce experiences

Data Engineering & Analytics

• Design platform-wide analytics architecture
• Build event tracking and behavioral analytics systems
• Create reporting infrastructure and business intelligence capabilities
• Develop seller analytics and marketplace insights systems
• Support recommendation engines and personalization systems
• Design scalable data pipelines and data models
• Establish key platform metrics and operational dashboards
• Create visibility into platform performance, engagement, retention, and monetization

Cloud Infrastructure, DevOps & Platform Engineering

• Design and manage cloud infrastructure architecture
• Establish deployment pipelines and engineering environments
• Build CI/CD systems and release management processes
• Implement infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code
• Design observability, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems
• Create backup, disaster recovery, and reliability strategies
• Optimize infrastructure costs, performance, and scalability
• Build internal tooling that improves engineering productivity
• Define operational standards supporting future engineering growth

Quality Engineering & Operational Excellence

• Establish automated testing standards
• Define QA processes and release readiness requirements
• Build monitoring and incident response procedures
• Improve platform reliability and operational stability
• Implement security best practices across systems
• Ensure production readiness for all releases
• Maintain platform performance and availability standards

Marketplace Systems & Revenue Infrastructure

• Design systems supporting marketplace growth and monetization
• Build seller onboarding, management, and operational workflows
• Support marketplace liquidity and engagement initiatives
• Develop features that increase transaction volume and retention
• Create systems aligned with long-term marketplace economics
• Contribute to monetization strategy through platform capabilities
• Help optimize conversion, retention, engagement, and revenue generation

Product Ownership & Strategic Execution

• Participate in roadmap and prioritization decisions
• Translate platform vision into executable systems
• Balance technical complexity against customer value
• Help define MVP scope and release priorities
• Make trade-off decisions supporting business goals
• Contribute to product strategy, platform evolution, and growth initiatives
• Evaluate opportunities through both technical and commercial perspectives

Team Building & Leadership

• Assist with hiring future engineers
• Review technical candidates
• Participate in technical interviews
• Mentor future developers and contractors
• Help establish engineering culture
• Define development processes and operational frameworks
• Transition into technical leadership responsibilities as the team grows

Do you have experience in System design?, Do you have a Bachelor’s degree?, * Several years of software engineering experience

• Strong frontend engineering expertise
• Strong backend architecture expertise
• Experience building and launching production applications
• Experience designing scalable platform architectures
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and deployment systems
• Experience making technical decisions across projects
• Strong understanding of software architecture patterns
• Strong systems thinking and platform design ability
• Ability to operate independently with minimal supervision
• Ability to build and ship features end-to-end
• Ability to balance technical excellence with business objectives

Preferred Experience:

Startup & Founding Team Experience

• Startup experience
• Founding engineer experience
• Early-stage product development experience
• Building products from MVP through growth stages
• Experience working directly with founders

Marketplace & Commerce Platforms

• Ecommerce platforms
• Social commerce platforms
• Marketplace businesses
• Creator economy platforms
• Consumer internet products
• Revenue-generating platform systems

Product & Business Thinking

• Product ownership experience
• Product strategy involvement
• Customer-focused decision making
• Marketplace monetization understanding
• Revenue growth experience
• Business outcome ownership

Enterprise & Scale

• Experience operating in both startup and enterprise environments
• Experience building systems serving large user bases
• Ability to combine startup execution speed with enterprise reliability

AI & Emerging Technologies

• LLM integrations
• AI-powered products
• Recommendation systems
• Intelligent automation
• AI-assisted development workflows
• Modern AI platform architecture

Leadership

• Technical leadership experience
• Team lead experience
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Mentorship experience
• Future leadership potential

Ideal Technology Stack:Frontend

• React
• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS

Backend

• Node.js
• NestJS
• PostgreSQL
• Redis

Mobile

• React Native

Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Infrastructure as Code

Data & AI

• Python
• Vector Databases
• Analytics Pipelines
• Recommendation Systems
• LLM Integrations

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field is preferred but not required.
• Relevant experience, portfolio quality, technical thinking, and execution ability are valued more highly.

Pulled from the full job description

• Flexible schedule, * Contract-based position
• Initially 15-20 hours/week
• Remote
• Flexible working hours
• Early-stage startup environment
• Compensation will depend on experience, skill level, involvement, and project scope.

This role may evolve into a larger long-term opportunity as RushCiti expands beyond the MVP stage.

RushCiti is a next-generation social commerce platform reimagining how people discover, shop, and engage online. We’re building a more immersive, social, and intelligent ecommerce experience that combines entertainment, discovery, community, and commerce into a single platform. Our vision is to make online shopping more engaging, personalized, and accessible for both consumers and sellers. We are currently in the MVP and platform-building stage and are assembling a small, highly capable team focused on execution, speed, and long-term growth.