We're hiring a Solutions Architect to design the systems behind the products Bolder Apps builds for US-based clients. You'll be the technical lead in the room from the first discovery call. You'll turn a client's idea into an architecture, a scope and a plan our engineering team can build. This is a design and review role, not a coding seat. You won't write production code. You'll guide the dev team, review their code and architecture, and own technical quality from kickoff to launch, so what ships matches what was designed. Our projects cover web, mobile and AI products. Many have multi-tenant setups, lots of third-party integrations and real privacy and security needs. This is a contract role, paid hourly and fully remote. It is open to people based anywhere in the United States. If you've designed and shipped client products at an agency or consultancy, and you can explain a trade-off to a founder as clearly as to an engineer, we want to talk.

About Us
Bolder Apps is a product development studio that partners with US-based startups and established companies to build and scale innovative digital products. We specialize in AI-powered development, full-cycle product creation, and engineering team augmentation. Our mission is simple: build bolder, faster, and smarter.

Our Culture & Values (read before applying)
We move fast. We take ownership. We work with AI, not against it. And we expect everyone to bring ideas, not wait for instructions.

There are no daily checklists, no micromanagement, and no corporate politics. Instead, you'll have autonomy, trust, and a team that's always ready to help you grow. At Bolder Apps, impact matters more than titles, and curiosity matters more than seniority.

If you want a place where you can level up fast and actually see your work making a difference - welcome aboard.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with clients. Ask the right questions, find the real constraints and turn a rough idea into a clear solution design
• Design the system architecture for web, mobile and AI products. Services, data model, hosting and how the pieces talk to each other
• Write the technical parts of proposals and scopes of work. Modules, user flows, acceptance criteria, edge cases and estimates the team can stand behind
• Design integrations with third-party APIs and vendors. Plan for retries, queues, webhooks and monitoring, and keep a clean way to swap a provider later
• Plan multi-tenant and white-label setups with proper data isolation and access control
• Build security and privacy in from day one. Encryption, audit logs, consent, data residency and the evidence clients need for an outside audit
• Design AI and LLM features for client products, including model choice, retrieval (RAG), guardrails and the evaluations that prove quality in production
• Plan in phases. Ship a lean MVP first and keep the design ready for the full build without a rewrite
• Work with sales and project managers on scope, timelines and risk. Push back early when something will not fit
• Review the dev team's code, pull requests and technical approach. Catch drift from the design early and explain what to change
• Guide and unblock engineers, set technical standards, and own technical quality through delivery and handover
• Keep the architecture docs current so anyone on the team can pick up the context

Requirements

• 5+ years in software engineering, with at least 2 years designing systems as a solutions architect, technical lead or similar
• Agency, consultancy or studio background. You've designed for several clients at the same time and you can switch context without losing quality
• You've owned the architecture of client products that went live with real users. Diagrams that never shipped don't count
• Strong backend and data fundamentals. You've designed APIs and relational data models (Postgres or similar) and you know where they break
• Cloud architecture experience on AWS, Azure or GCP, including containers, deploys and monitoring
• Real integration design experience. Third-party APIs, webhooks, SSO and OAuth, background queues and failure handling
• Hands-on AI architecture. You've designed LLM or RAG features with evaluation for production client products, and you know what they change about cost, latency and testing
• Strong code and architecture reviewer. You can read a pull request, spot when it drifts from the design and explain the fix to the engineer
• Comfortable running client-facing technical calls. You can explain a trade-off to a non-technical founder in plain words
• You write clear technical scopes with estimates the team actually hits
• AI-augmented workflow. You use AI tools every day in your own design, review and writing work
• Excellent written and spoken English. Clients read your documents and hear your voice directly

Nice to have

• Multi-tenant SaaS, row-level security or white-label deployments
• Products with strict privacy or compliance needs, such as sensitive personal data, data residency rules or third-party security audits
• Mobile architecture (React Native or Flutter)
• Comfortable reviewing TypeScript and Node.js (NestJS or similar) and React or Next.js code
• E-commerce platforms such as Shopify
• Mentoring engineers and setting technical standards for a team

Benefits

• Contract role, paid hourly, fully remote from anywhere in the US
• A wide mix of web, mobile and AI products for the US market
• Steady pipeline of client work as part of a growing team
• Real ownership over technical design, with no rigid playbook
• Direct line to decision-makers, no extra layers between you and the people who own the outcome
• A peer network of engineers, designers and PMs working on overlapping projects