System Architect

Right-Hand Cybersecurity
Full-timeAnywhere, Worldwide

Company Description:

At Right-Hand, our mission is to make humans more defensible against cyber threats. With roughly 82% of breaches caused by human error, we are building the next-generation Human Risk Management platform that changes employee behaviors and quantifies and reduces human risk to reduce burdensome security alerts for security teams. The daily fulfillment of this mission would not be possible without the cornerstone of Right-Hand’s business - its people. We firmly believe that if we take care of our employees, they will take care of our customers, and the rest will work itself out. The founding team at Right-Hand has created a culture that evangelises six core values:

Resilience:

We solve problems and overcome challenges to the best of our ability, regardless of how daunting they may appear.

Empathy:

We listen to and understand the perspective of others, including our peers, customers, partners and investors.

Passion:

We care deeply about our work, our customers, each other and this company.

Accountability:

We trust each other to get our job done at a high level.

Transparency:

We act and communicate openly, honestly, and effectively to drive toward positive outcomes.

Authenticity:

We understand who we are and will surround ourselves with a diverse group of people who complement our skillset and share our values.

If you want to join this mission-driven team and believe you fit the profile below, let’s talk!

Get to know the role:

  • Set and communicate clear technical direction for the platform, making strategic architectural decisions that balance innovation, reliability, and maintainability
  • Rally the engineering team around shared architectural goals and technology choices, building consensus across diverse perspectives
  • Continuously audit existing implementations to identify architectural weaknesses, performance bottlenecks, and security risks—prioritize improvements that enhance enterprise readiness
  • Drive continuous improvement of our architecture to meet enterprise requirements: scalability, security compliance, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence
  • Stay ahead of industry trends and evaluate emerging technologies that could enhance our platform's capabilities, security posture, and competitive advantage

Continuous Architecture Improvement & Enterprise Readiness

  • Conduct ongoing, systematic reviews of our existing implementations to identify architectural weaknesses, performance limitations, security gaps, and operational challenges
  • Establish continuous monitoring and assessment processes that keep enterprise readiness metrics visible—scalability, security compliance, resilience, data consistency, and observability
  • Design and implement incremental improvements that enhance enterprise readiness without disrupting active development and customer-facing operations
  • Work with product and engineering teams to prioritize architectural enhancements that unlock new enterprise customer capabilities and market opportunities
  • Document architectural decisions and trade-offs, creating a knowledge base that guides future engineering decisions

Hands-On Technical Leadership

  • Get directly involved in critical technical decisions and complex implementations—knowing when to mentor and when to directly code
  • Lead architecture design reviews and technical discussions, simplifying complex problems into approachable solutions for the entire team
  • Participate in code reviews, design decisions, and technical spike investigations on high-impact projects
  • Build proofs-of-concept and prototypes to validate architectural approaches before team-wide adoption
  • Contribute to critical systems and projects end-to-end, particularly during high-stakes transitions or performance crises

Mentoring & Team Development

  • Mentor and sponsor engineers across the organization, creating observable, measurable improvements in their technical growth and career trajectory
  • Foster a culture of ownership, technical pride, and architectural awareness throughout the engineering team
  • Balance your own individual contributions with efforts that multiply the effectiveness of peers—enabling others to make better decisions independently
  • Establish engineering standards, best practices, and architectural patterns that promote consistency and quality across the codebase
  • Create psychological safety for engineers to question decisions and propose improvements

Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Work as a true partner to product and design teams, where roles blur and you make strategic trade-offs that shape the product direction
  • Advise leadership on technical feasibility, risks, and resource requirements for ambitious product initiatives
  • Translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders, making complex architectural concepts understandable to business leaders
  • Partner with the security and infrastructure teams to ensure compliance, risk management, and operational excellence

Scaling & Performance Engineering

  • Design and implement architectures that support millions of concurrent users with sub-second response times and high availability
  • Lead database optimization efforts; schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and scaling approaches for SQL-based systems under extreme load
  • Architect distributed systems, microservices, and infrastructure approaches that enable independent scaling of system components
  • Establish monitoring, observability, and alerting frameworks that provide deep insight into system behavior and performance
  • Manage technical debt strategically, knowing which technical shortcuts are acceptable now and which must be addressed immediately

Security & Risk Management

  • Embed security into architectural decisions, ensuring the platform meets enterprise security requirements and compliance standards
  • Conduct threat modeling and security reviews of critical systems, identifying and mitigating risk vectors
  • Establish secure coding practices, encryption strategies, and access control patterns across the platform
  • Partner with security teams to conduct architecture-level risk assessments and ensure compliance with industry standards
  • Build resilience and disaster recovery into core systems, designing for failure scenarios

The Must Haves:

Experience & Background

  • 8+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing software products, with demonstrated technical leadership in at least 5 of those years
  • Proven track record of architecting and scaling systems that support millions of concurrent users in production environments
  • Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating enterprise-scale distributed systems and cloud infrastructure
  • Deep expertise in security and risk management within distributed systems—threat modeling, secure architecture, compliance requirements
  • Experience enhancing and scaling existing systems to meet enterprise requirements, including identifying and remediating architectural gaps at scale
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field from a reputable university (or equivalent demonstrated experience)

Technical Expertise

Core Development & Languages

  • Expert-level proficiency with at least two modern programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, or Rails
  • Demonstrated ability to master new languages and frameworks quickly, evaluating them for production use
  • Solid understanding of language design trade-offs and performance characteristics

Database & Data Systems

  • Deep expertise in SQL databases, including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and performance tuning at scale
  • Experience with advanced SQL concepts: window functions, CTEs, query planning, and optimization strategies
  • Familiarity with database scaling techniques: replication, sharding, partitioning, and data warehousing approaches
  • Knowledge of NoSQL systems and understanding of trade-offs between relational and non-relational data models
  • Experience managing databases under high load with 24/7 uptime requirements

Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture

  • Mastery of AWS infrastructure and services
  • Deep understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code approaches and tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
  • Knowledge of distributed systems concepts: consistency models, replication, consensus protocols
  • Strong understanding of networking, load balancing, and service discovery

Full-Stack Architecture Mastery

  • Expert-level understanding of the complete technology stack: frontend frameworks, backend APIs, message queues, caching layers, databases, and infrastructure
  • Experience evaluating and selecting technology stacks for different problem domains
  • Knowledge of modern API design patterns (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and their trade-offs
  • Expertise in designing resilient systems with proper error handling, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation

Software Design & Architecture

  • Mastery of architectural patterns: microservices, event-driven architecture, CQRS, layered architecture
  • Strong grasp of design principles: SOLID, DRY, KISS, and when to apply or bend them
  • Experience with system design trade-offs and architectural decision records (ADRs)
  • Understanding of observability, logging, tracing, and monitoring at scale

Required Soft Skills:

Exceptional communication: Able to explain complex architectural concepts clearly to engineers, product teams, and non-technical stakeholders

Strategic thinking: Ability to think about long-term platform evolution while shipping incrementally

Decisiveness: Can make difficult trade-off decisions with incomplete information and drive alignmen

Intellectual humility: Open to being wrong, willing to revisit decisions, and learns from failures

Empathy & mentoring ability: Creates psychological safety for teams, sponsors engineer growth, and builds trust

Bias toward action: Balances perfectionism with pragmatism, ships when the time is right

Systems thinking: Sees connections between components, understands second and third-order effects

Cultural leadership: Models technical pride, ownership, and excellence; influences others through example

Our Benefits:

Yes, our benefits are great but we hope you want to work at Right-Hand because you believe in our mission to make humans more defensible against cyber threats.

  • Competitive Salary
  • Paid annual and medical leaves
  • Medical benefit
  • Flexibility in how and where you work
  • Generous parental leave programs
  • Wellbeing days
  • and more...

Diversity and Inclusion are more than just words for us. Our commitment to inclusion across gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, educational background, religion, ability, socioeconomic background, immigration statuses, and experiences drives us forward every day. We foster an open, tolerant, and constructive work environment with a team consisting of diverse views and backgrounds.

Right-Hand is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment including the decision to hire and promote will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We encourage all interested applicants to apply.

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