Staff Engineer

About the role

Blockskye is transforming corporate travel and entertainment with next-generation blockchain-powered booking, payment, and expense solutions. This role requires a Software Architect with a strong background in modern web architectures on AWS and polyglot fluency across backend languages.

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.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• A collaborative mindset and a strong sense of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.