System Architect

Cricut® empowers people to make and personalize almost anything—from custom cards and apparel to everyday items and home décor. Our smart cutting machines, design apps, and materials make creativity easy and accessibleforeveryone. We believe everyone is born creative, and our mission is to put the power of handmade into the hands of all. With a passionate community of Makers around the world, Cricut helps turn inspiration into real, tangible creations—one project at a time.

Let’s make.

We’relooking for a System Architect to define and guide the end-to-end architecture for a cross-platform design product—spanning desktop and mobile apps for manual and AI-assisted design creation, cloud-saved projects, and dependable connectivity and execution on cutting machines over Bluetooth, USB, andWi‑Fi.

This role requires deep systemthinking across client apps, backend services, device connectivity, and hardware/firmware integration—ensuring the entire system is secure, scalable, extensible, maintainable, observable, and delightful to use. Equally important, this architect will shape how AI is woven into both the product experience and the way our engineering organization builds software.

Key Responsibilities

• Champion AI-native engineering practices across the organization—agentic coding tools, AI-assisted code review, automated test generation, and AI-augmented design and ADR workflows—while maintaining code quality, security, and human oversight.
• Drive the end-to-end architecture from front-end apps through cloud services to machine execution, including data flow, control flow, latency, reliability, and failurerecovery.
• Set clear APIs and integration contracts between app, cloud, and devices (including versioning/backward compatibility).
• Design cross-platform application architecture(e.g., iOS/Android, desktop) for complex workflows.
• Ensure strong reliability, security, and performance(retries, encryption, permissions).
• Define observability standards across applications, services, and devices by establishing metrics, tracing, and logging practices, along with connectivity diagnostics and user-level debugging tools.
• Establish architectural governance by defining reference architectures, conducting design reviews, managing the ADR process, setting coding standards where needed, and aligning technical roadmaps with product goals.
• Partner cross-functionally with product, design, QA, manufacturing, firmware/EE, AI/ML, support, and security to ensure decisions are practical and shippable.
• Mentor engineering leaders and help teams make high-quality tradeoffs in performance, UX, reliability, and cost.

• 10+ years of software development experience, building and shipping production systems spanning client apps + backend + device integration.
• Demonstrated track record designing and shipping cross-platform products at scale—keeping iOS, Android, desktop, and/or web feature-aligned through shared code, platform abstraction layers, and disciplined API contracts. Experience with frameworks like React Native or Flutter.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into production systems—model orchestration, retrieval, agentic patterns, evals, and managing latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs.
• Fluent and pragmatic user of modern AI engineering tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Agentic
  
  SDKs); able to lead the team in adopting them safely and effectively.
• Track record leading large refactors/migrations (modernization, modular architecture).
• Ability to communicate architecture clearly (diagrams, ADRs, tradeoffs) and influence across multiple teams.
• Ability to balance hands-on implementation (90%) with architecture leadership.
• Strong experience with REST APIs, microservices, and backend integration.
• Strong foundation in security, with hands-on experience in asymmetric cryptography.

Soft Skills

• Clear technical communication (written and verbal) across disciplines.
• Ability to influence without direct authority; strong stakeholder alignment skills.
• Mentorship mindset with a track record of leveling up senior engineers.
• Strategic thinking paired with attention to implementation detail.
• Continuous…