Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
Responsibilities
The following information is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or required skills.
- Set the end-to-end architecture: data storage, task orchestration, model-in-the-loop pipelines, multi-tenant, and observability.
- Drive every “build vs. buy” decision and seed the initial tech stack (cloud, languages, frameworks, infra-as-code).
- Prototype core services quickly
- Participate in the recruiting process, mentor, and unblock a small team of back-end, full-stack, and front-end engineers as the company scales.
- Partner with the Product Lead to translate fuzzy customer needs into clear, actionable technical requirements.
- Establish engineering culture, coding standards, and CI/CD from day one.
- Represent the technology narrative with stakeholders, design partners, and early enterprise customers.
In the first week, expect to
- Join our team, where you will be introduced to Toptal’s practices and processes.
- Start participating in company-wide training sessions.
- Get familiar with our product vision
- Set up your local environment and get familiar with our tech stack.
In the first month, expect to
- Understand what has been built so far
- Identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement
- Contribute to architectural design and decision-making
In the first three months, expect to
- Lead technical initiatives in our team
- Work on long-term roadmap and scalability
- Suggest and implement improvements to Toptal’s processes and codebase, while exercising discretion and independent judgment.
In the first six months, expect to
- Stay up to date with technology advancements and ensure our technology stack is optimized for strategic growth and the competitive advantage of Toptal.
- Balance the technical roadmap to account for both existing technical debt and long-term strategy for sustainable growth.
- Mentor Toptal’s new team members.
In the first year, expect to
- Work on scaling the data-labeling engine
- Build a roadmap to achieve compliance
Qualifications and Job Requirements
- 10+ years designing and shipping distributed systems at scale
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills. Great executive presence, and ability to partner and support with executives.
- Fluency with a major cloud (e.g., GCP or AWS) plus a modern tech stack (Ruby/Rails, Python, Rust, Golang, Java etc.)
- Deep track record architecting large-scale, multi-tenant applications and platforms
- Experience hiring, mentoring, and growing a small team of back-end, full-stack, and front-end engineers.
- Hands-on experience building zero-to-one products and navigating rapid iteration under ambiguity.
- Comfort pitching architecture to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders—and rolling up sleeves to write production code.
- A collaborative, founder-level mindset: bias to action, ownership over outcomes, and passion for elegant, pragmatic solutions.…
