Technical Lead / Architect

The Art of Living is working toward something unfashionably large: a happier, safer world, built on real human values. Most people meet that mission through its programs and volunteers. Increasingly, they meet it through software — and the technology team is the group that builds it, creating products that help the Foundation reach millions of users across the globe.

We're a small, product-focused team with a grand vision, which means the technical decisions made here compound quickly — for better or worse. We value collaboration, continuous learning, and real-world impact, and we look for people who are genuinely excited to take on challenging problems in a supportive environment.

We're seeking a Technical Lead / Architect to own the technical direction of our platform — designing systems that scale to millions of users while raising the engineering bar for the whole team. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll still write code, but your biggest leverage is through architecture, mentorship, and sound technical judgment.

You'll lead the design and evolution of robust, scalable, secure systems, making — and, just as importantly, documenting — the big structural decisions. You'll design for performance, fault tolerance, and cost-efficiency, and you'll own the system's health at scale.

Leadership here is close to the work. You'll guide and grow engineers through design reviews, pairing, and coaching, and set the technical culture of the team. At the same time you'll stay close to the code: building critical components, prototyping, and unblocking the hardest problems yourself when that's the fastest path.

You'll champion code quality, testing, security, and observability across teams, and own the technology strategy — evaluating tools and frameworks, managing tech debt deliberately, and making well-reasoned build-versus-buy calls. Throughout, you'll work with product and design to turn ambitious goals into achievable technical plans.

You have eight or more years in software engineering, including leading teams and owning the architecture of production systems, with a proven track record designing distributed systems that handle real load.

Your technical depth runs the stack: strong command of Node.js (TypeScript) and/or Go alongside modern frontend frameworks like React or Svelte; deep database experience across relational, NoSQL, and key-value stores, including schema design and optimization; hands-on cloud and infrastructure work with AWS, GCP, or Azure, Docker, and Kubernetes; and fluency with monitoring and logging stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, or New Relic.

Just as important is how you lead: you've demonstrated the ability to mentor engineers and drive alignment without heavy-handedness, and you can explain complex technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Extra credit for event-driven architecture and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ), a strong security engineering background, experience with multi-region or high-availability systems, and open-source contributions or public technical writing.

Hybrid working, a supportive and mission-driven environment, and the chance to build technology that reaches millions of people and does real good in the world. Few architecture jobs come with this blast radius of good.

Titles aside, here's the shape of the person we're looking for. You can design a system that scales to millions and explain every trade-off in it. You lead technically without losing your hands-on edge, and you raise the whole team's bar through reviews and mentorship. You balance pragmatism with long-term architectural health, and when you make a tech-selection or build-versus-buy call, the reasoning is sound — and communicable.