
Lead System Architect - High Availability & Cloud Infrastructure at Chiri (South, United States)
Chiri· South, United States·
Role details
Job description
About Chiri
Chiri collapses fragmented software into one governed operating layer for mid-sized businesses: companies with valuable workflows and real urgency, but no internal AI organization to take a use case to production. We combine our platform with forward-deployed expertise to connect customers' existing systems, build what they need, and operate it in production. Increasingly, buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and other AI systems what they should use. Chiri must be one of their top answers.
Role Overview
We're looking for an experienced Lead System Architect to design and help implement highly available, resilient infrastructure for a new healthcare and pharmacy-finance platform. This is a hands-on architecture role requiring engineering leadership across a small dedicated team, deep expertise in Kubernetes, Terraform, cell-based architecture, and real-time observability. The systems you design must maintain reliability and performance as transaction volumes grow.
Key Responsibilities
- Resilient Architecture: Design highly available, fault-tolerant systems with redundancy, failure isolation, automated recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities.
- Cloud Infrastructure: Architect and implement Kubernetes-based environments using Terraform and infrastructure as code.
- Cell-Based Design: Establish independent deployment and failure boundaries that limit the impact of outages and support scalable operations.
- Observability: Build comprehensive, real-time monitoring across infrastructure, applications, transactions, data pipelines, latency, errors, and system health.
- Engineering Delivery: Work with backend and data engineers to establish deployment standards, performance targets, operational controls, and secure production environments.
- Architectural decisions: across infrastructure, backend services, data engineering, and ML.
- Team coordination: Conduct technical reviews, resolve blockers, and remain hands-on with engineering work.
Required Skills and Experience
- Proven experience architecting and operating highly available production systems.
- Advanced hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Terraform.
- Experience implementing cell-based, fault-isolated, or similarly resilient distributed architectures.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, load balancing, autoscaling, service reliability, and disaster recovery.
- Experience building observability platforms with metrics, logs, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
- Experience with CI/CD, container security, infrastructure automation, and production incident management.
- Experience leading small, cross-functional engineering teams, coordinating architecture, technical decisions, and end-to-end delivery across infrastructure, backend, and data engineering.
- Customer-Facing Delivery Leadership: Proven ability to serve as the primary technical lead for client engagements, managing requirements, milestones, technical communications, and delivery accountability with minimal oversight.
- Experience with Microsoft Azure. We care more about demonstrated results than credentials, agency pedigree, or an arbitrary number of years.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building low-latency, transaction-intensive platforms.
- Experience in healthcare, financial services, or other regulated environments.
- Familiarity with HIPAA-related security and data isolation requirements. Infrastructure standard: Terraform is required. Azure Bicep is not part of the intended infrastructure approach.
What We Offer
A high-ownership opportunity to establish the architecture and reliability foundations of a new production platform, working directly with Chiri's technical leadership.
Why work at Chiri
- Culture: Described as ambitious, with a focus on shaping the future of Human+AI teams. The company emphasizes a "Sherpa" mentality—carrying the weight for clients and not leaving them at base camp.
- Remote/Hybrid Policy: Hybrid workspace; employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work. Typical on-site time is not specified but roles are listed as remote across 18-20 locations.
- Notable Perks/Engineering Culture: Engineers own features end-to-end and work directly with clients to deliver measurable business outcomes. Roles emphasize backend focus, API design, AI-powered features, and collaboration across product and client teams. Open roles include Full Stack, Mobile (iOS/Flutter), QA, and Data Platform engineers.