Software Architect, Backend

New York City (Remote) or Boston (Remote)

At Rapid

SOS, we are committed to using technology to build a safer, stronger future and working together to save lives. We’re in an exciting phase of growth, welcoming new members from across the globe to our mission-driven, ambitious, and inclusive team. Our work is founded on our values of trust and safety
, pioneering
, urgency
, and purpose over pride
, all of which support a company culture where people can innovate, collaborate, grow, and, above all, make an impact.

Rapid

SOS is an intelligent safety platform that harnesses artificial and human intelligence to fuse life‑saving data from 600M+ connected devices, apps, and sensors from 210+ global technology companies, then delivers it to over 22,000+ public safety agencies in 11 countries. Powered by Rapid

SOS HARMONY, the industry’s first purpose‑built AI for public safety, Rapid

SOS empowers first responders with real‑time intelligence and the situational awareness needed to help protect property and save lives. Learn more at

What this role is about:

As a Software Architect, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the systems, patterns, and technical direction behind this life‑saving infrastructure. You’ll design and evolve a real‑time, globally distributed platform connecting 600M+ devices, apps, and sensors to public safety. In this role, you’ll shape how AI, data, and critical infrastructure come together to support telecommunicators in their most urgent moments. Collaborating with engineering, AI, and product teams, you’ll lead architectural vision across distributed systems, high‑throughput pipelines, real‑time APIs, and AI‑driven capabilities, ensuring our platform is fast, resilient, and intelligent.

You’ll also champion an AI‑forward approach and evangelize best practices to how we design, build, and operate software across the organization.

What you’ll do:

• Drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the next generation of Rapid
  
  SOS UNITE – the platform that brings real‑time data and AI‑driven intelligence to public safety.
• Lead strategic architectural decisions and align teams while designing real‑time, low‑latency systems that ingest, process, and respond to sensor, call, and AI data with high performance, scalability, and reliability across regions.
• Design for global scale with cross‑region deployments, failover strategies, and dynamic scaling during high‑impact events.
• Integrate AI into production systems, ensuring models are deployed, monitored, and continuously improved with real‑world data.
• Iterate fast, identify and assess opportunities to enhance applications, refactor when new information shows a better path, and ensure the codebase stays clean, stable, and ready for continuous evolution.
• Collaborate and lead architecture discussions in an agile environment with stakeholders across Engineering, GTM, Design, and Product to develop solutions for Rapid
  
  SOS products.
• Guide and mentor engineers in adopting architectural best practices and best‑in‑class software development practices, coding standards, and system observability principles such as system patterns, performance, and observability.
• Work directly with engineering teams and stay hands‑on in the codebase as you build and iterate on the solutions you design.

What we’re looking for in our ideal candidate:

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience, including leading architectural initiatives, with deep expertise in Python.
• Proven experience in designing and scaling distributed event‑driven systems, ideally in real‑time or mission‑critical environments.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and infrastructure, stream processing, and AI/ML infrastructure.
• Understanding of how to deploy and optimize LLMs and other models in production environments; ideally has experience building AI‑driven features or using AI tools to enhance acceleration of development, and is proactive about leveraging emerging technologies.
• Strong systems thinking, clear communication, and the ability to lead across technical domains.
• Experience working with relational and non‑relational databases, especially GIS databases (PostGIS, Mongo
  
  DB Atlas) and…