LEAD PLATFORM ARCHITECT/ TECHNICAL LEAD

Role Description

KENTECH is seeking a Lead Platform Architect / Technical Lead to design and personally help build the technical foundation of a new enterprise software platform. This is not a traditional enterprise architect role. It is not a meeting-heavy engineering management position. And it is not a role where architecture is handed to another team to implement.

The successful candidate will report directly to KENTECH's Founder & CEO and will have meaningful authority over technology architecture, engineering standards, technical decision-making, and the development of the initial engineering team.

Why This Role Is Different

• Build — don't inherit: You will have the opportunity to establish the architecture of an important enterprise platform without inheriting years of technical debt or an inflexible legacy stack.
• Real customers and real operating knowledge: KENTECH has nearly two decades of operational experience, established customer relationships, proprietary intellectual property, and deep institutional knowledge of the problems our technology is designed to solve.
• Direct access and authority: You will report directly to the Founder & CEO, with a small initial engineering team for quick decision-making.
• Help build the team: You will participate in selecting the engineers who will build alongside you and help establish the standards for future hires.
• Solve consequential problems: The systems we build operate in environments where security, auditability, reliability, data integrity, permissions, privacy, and operational accuracy matter.

What You Will Own

• Design the architecture of a secure, scalable, multi-tenant enterprise SaaS platform.
• Personally write production software alongside other senior engineers.
• Establish domain and data architecture.
• Design authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, and role-based permissions.
• Establish API and integration architecture.
• Design secure handling of sensitive information and documents.
• Establish auditability and transaction-history standards.
• Define cloud architecture and deployment strategy.
• Establish engineering standards, code-review practices, testing standards, and documentation expectations.
• Establish CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and production support practices.
• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions.
• Identify and prevent architectural decisions that create unnecessary long-term technical debt.
• Evaluate existing technical assets and make recommendations regarding what should be retained, refactored, or replaced.
• Help recruit, interview, and mentor the initial engineering team.
• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Establish an engineering culture centered on ownership, quality, speed, and accountability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Significant experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Platform Architect, Technical Lead, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building production SaaS applications.
• Experience designing multi-tenant systems.
• Strong backend engineering expertise.
• Strong understanding of modern frontend and application architecture.
• Deep understanding of relational databases and data modeling.
• Experience designing APIs and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, RBAC, and application security.
• Experience working with sensitive or regulated data.
• Experience building software within a compliance-oriented environment such as SOC 2, CJIS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, or an equivalent framework.
• Deep AWS experience designing and operating secure production systems in regulated environments.
• Experience establishing CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience with automated testing, monitoring, and production debugging.
• Ability to independently evaluate architectural tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated ability to personally write production-quality software.

Requirements

• Experience involving one or more of the following is valuable, but not required:
• AWS GovCloud experience, including deployment, migration, or operation of regulated workloads.
• GovTech
• Regulated enterprise SaaS
• Public-sector technology
• Security-sensitive applications
• Case or workflow management
• HR technology
• Investigative technology
• Document management
• Sensitive PII
• Enterprise integrations
• Event-driven architecture
• AI-assisted enterprise workflows

Technical Environment

The final technology stack will be established with the selected technical leader. Candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern cloud-native environment that may include technologies such as:

• TypeScript / JavaScript
• React / Next.js
• Node.js or comparable backend technologies
• PostgreSQL
• AWS
• Docker
• Infrastructure as Code
• REST APIs
• CI/CD
• Automated testing
• Cloud monitoring and observability

How You Will Spend Your Time

Initially, this position should remain highly technical. Approximately:

• 60–70% architecture and hands-on engineering
• 20–25% technical leadership, design review, and code review
• 10–15% hiring, mentoring, planning, and technical strategy

What Success Looks Like

• Understand KENTECH's business and operational environment.
• Assess existing technical assets.
• Establish a clear target architecture.
• Make core technology-stack decisions.
• Define platform, security, data, and integration architecture.
• Establish engineering environments and delivery processes.
• Introduce strong engineering and testing standards.
• Recruit or evaluate members of the initial engineering team.
• Begin delivering production-quality platform capabilities.
• Establish a repeatable foundation upon which additional products and capabilities can be built.

Background Screening

KENTECH is a licensed private investigative and background screening company. All employees are subject to a comprehensive background investigation as a condition of employment. Additional personnel-security requirements may apply depending on system access and customer requirements.

Why KENTECH

• An established company.
• Real customers.
• Proprietary domain knowledge.
• A greenfield technology opportunity.
• Direct access to the CEO.
• A small engineering team.
• Genuine authority to shape what gets built and how it gets built.

This is a remote position.