Distributed Systems Architect

Are you ready to build the future of supply chain? At Gather AI, we're not just creating software; we're pioneering a new era of warehouse intelligence. We've developed a groundbreaking, vision-powered platform that uses autonomous drones and existing equipment to capture real-time data, completely digitizing workflows that have historically been manual and error-prone. This means facilities operate smarter, safer, and more efficiently, ultimately redefining "on-time, in full" delivery. If you're looking for an opportunity to contribute to truly transformative technology and make a significant impact in a vital industry, Gather AI is the place for you. We're leading the charge in the rapidly evolving robotics industry, and we invite you to join us in reshaping the global supply chain, one intelligent warehouse at a time.

As a Distributed Systems Architect at Gather AI you will serve as a technical anchor for our engineering organization. This role is for someone who thrives on the challenge of evolving mature, complex SaaS systems, setting technical direction, architecture, and ensuring our platforms remain reliable and perform as we scale. To be successful in this role, you must be able to design, evaluate, and guide decisions across the entire stack—from database internals to distributed service patterns.

• →Own Architecture: Align backend, frontend, platform, and infrastructure decisions into a coherent, enterprise-grade architecture.
• →Reflect Excellence: Replace "firefighting" with predictable execution. You will lead the effort to retire scalability and reliability debt, safely upgrade critical infrastructure, and reduce single-threaded dependencies.
• →Set Direction: Set the standard for engineering technical hygiene. You will drive high-level decisions on testing strategies, validation guardrails, and system design concerns that directly impact delivery speed and maintainability.
• →Evolve Systems: Modernize and scale existing production systems by applying database-level strategies (schema evolution, replication tradeoffs) and platform primitives (orchestration, runtime constraints) as architectural tools.
• →Mentor: Elevate the organization by establishing shared practices, aligning terminology, and mentoring senior talent across the engineering team.

• →Exhibit First-Principles Thinking: Establish a deep understanding of data systems, latency-sensitive services, and failure modes.

• Distributed Systems: Mastery of performance-sensitive REST APIs, caching strategies, and core distributed systems concepts.
• Relational Data Systems: Expert-level PostgreSQL (upgrades, query tuning, replication tradeoffs, and schema evolution) and advanced SQL.
• Cloud & Containers: Deep experience with Azure and/or AWS and production-grade Kubernetes/Docker.
• Backend Development: Strong production experience in Node.js and/or Python.
• Reliability & Security: Hands-on experience with Observability (logs, metrics, traces), CI/CD, SRE fundamentals (SLIs/SLOs), and security hygiene (IAM, secrets management).

• Domain Expertise: Experience in logistics, warehouse systems, or robotics-adjacent platforms is a plus, but not required. We value your ability to apply sound architectural judgment to new problem spaces.
• Future Scale: If you have operated at a slightly smaller scale but can reason clearly about "what breaks next" (e.g., multi-regional architectures or advanced data governance), we will help you bridge that gap.
• Organizational Maturity: While we value experience driving org-wide standards, we don't expect perfection on day one. We look for the intent to elevate our shared practices as you build trust.
• AI-Ready: At Gather, we are at the leading edge of both applied classical ML and next-gen LLM/VLM AI. Come prepared to work with the latest and greatest tooling. 

In this position, you won't just be writing code; you will be designing the future of a scaling organization with the autonomy to solve high-stakes problems.