Cloud Systems Architect Leader

TrekAI is reinventing education through AI. As a high-growth, mission-driven startup, we build technology that directly impacts teachers, students, and school systems.

As TrekAI’s Cloud Systems Architect Leader, you will own the design, scalability, and security of our AI and cloud platform architecture — and lead the engineers who build it. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a “paper architect” position. You will set technical direction, build proofs-of-concept, develop infrastructure-as-code, guide deployment pipelines, and grow a high-performing engineering team while driving execution alongside product and executive leadership.

Working closely with the CTO, CPO, and Director of Engineering, you will shape TrekAI’s long-term architecture strategy and engineering practices while ensuring the platform remains scalable, resilient, secure, and compliant with student-data-privacy standards.

• Lead and grow a team of platform, infrastructure, and backend engineers; set technical standards, review designs, and drive delivery.
• Own the technical roadmap and translate business goals into architecture and execution plans.
• Establish engineering best practices — code review, testing, observability, on-call, and incident response.
• Partner with executive leadership on hiring, planning, and cross-team technical decisions.

• Own cloud-native reference architecture (e.g., GCP/Digital Ocean): VPC, IAM, service meshes, Kubernetes, autoscaling, multi-tenant isolation.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible) and Git Ops (e.g., ArgoCD) adoption.
• Design for high availability, disaster recovery (RPO/RTO targets), and cost efficiency.
• Define the end-to-end reference architecture: microservices, APIs, orchestration, messaging/event buses, and data pipelines.
• Design patterns for multi-agent coordination, experimentation (feature flags, A/B tests), and fast AI model rollouts.
• Maintain clear boundaries between core IP, third-party components, and open-source dependencies.

• Architect scalable model-serving platforms with autoscaling and GPU scheduling.
• Build secure feature stores (e.g., Redis) and vector retrieval pipelines using technologies such as PostgreSQL/pgvector and Pinecone.
• Support continuous training/retraining workflows with CI/CD integration and drift monitoring.

• Embed zero-trust security at every layer: RBAC, workload identity, network segmentation, secret management (Vault/KMS).
• Perform lightweight threat analysis for model pipelines, APIs, and user data flows; ensure FERPA, COPPA, GDPR compliance.

• BS/MS in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years designing and building distributed systems with direct IaC experience, including 5+ years leading, mentoring, or acting as tech lead for engineering teams.
• Proven track record leading technical execution and delivering complex platforms end to end.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes, virtual machines, service meshes, serverless computing patterns, and cloud networking.
• Proven ability to design modular, scalable microservices architectures.
• Solid knowledge and administrative experience with Linux distributions (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL), cloud networking administration, and Windows (client-side) / macOS (client-side).
• Solid programming and DB skills:
  Python, React, Node.js, Java, JSON, SQL, No
  
  SQL.
• Skilled in secure cloud architecture, identity and access management, encryption strategies, and compliance-by-design.
• Excellent communicator and technical leader who can align engineers, ML scientists, and product teams and translate requirements into scalable design.
• Educational technology (EdTech) or SaaS platform experience.
• Experience scaling engineering teams and processes in a startup environment.