{"id":3842944,"url":"https://alion.io/job/marcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms","title":"Contract Systems Architect — AI, AWS & Consumer Platforms","company":{"id":449918,"name":"MarcoPolo Learning","domain":"marcopololearning.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/marcopolo-learning","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"BambooHR","truth_index":null},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"worldwide","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":{"label":"US time zones","utc_offset_min":-8,"utc_offset_max":-5},"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T21:00:41Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T21:00:41Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"Contract Systems Architect — AI, AWS & Consumer Platforms\nEngagement: Project-based independent contractor\nLocation: Remote, worldwide; North American time zones preferred\nSchedule: Flexible, with agreed overlap with our team\nCompensation: Hourly or fixed project fee, based on scope and experience\nAbout usWe’re an AI-focused consumer technology startup building products designed to reach a large user base. We’re looking for an experienced Systems Architect to help us make practical technical decisions, deliver reliable AI capabilities, and establish infrastructure that can grow with the business.\nThis is a project-based contract role. Each engagement will have an agreed scope, timeline, deliverables, and acceptance criteria. Follow-on projects may be available as our needs evolve.\nThe roleYou’ll work directly with founders and engineers to translate product goals into secure, scalable, and cost-effective systems. Your work may span architecture reviews, AWS infrastructure, AI model integration, agentic workflows, and production readiness.\nYou should be comfortable moving from architecture diagrams to code, prototypes, infrastructure configuration, and technical reviews. We value clear judgment: knowing what to build now, what to defer, and when a simpler design will serve the business better.\nWhat you’ll do\nAssess our product requirements, existing architecture, and infrastructure; identify risks, bottlenecks, and priorities.\n\nDesign AWS architectures for consumer applications, including APIs, compute, storage, databases, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing.\n\nEvaluate AI models and providers against representative workloads, balancing output quality, latency, reliability, privacy, and cost.\n\nDesign AI capabilities such as retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, tool use, and agent orchestration where they improve the product.\n\nEstablish production controls for AI workflows, including evaluations, tracing, execution limits, retries, fallbacks, and appropriate human approval.\n\nAddress consumer platform needs such as authentication, authorization, user data protection, traffic spikes, abuse prevention, and responsive user experiences.\n\nDefine infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, environment separation, monitoring, backup, and recovery practices.\n\nPartner with engineers on implementation, review critical code and infrastructure changes, and validate key assumptions through prototypes or load testing.\n\nDocument decisions and provide a clear handoff so our team can operate and extend the systems independently.\n\nWhat you’ll bring\nA strong track record as a Systems Architect, Staff/Principal Engineer, or technical leader building and operating production software.\n\nDeep hands-on AWS experience and the ability to explain service choices and architectural tradeoffs.\n\nExperience shipping consumer applications and managing growth, availability, performance, and infrastructure costs.\n\nProduction experience integrating LLMs and building AI workflows beyond demonstrations or proofs of concept.\n\nCurrent knowledge of leading commercial and open-weight models, with a repeatable approach to evaluating new releases.\n\nStrong backend engineering skills in Python, TypeScript/Node.js, or comparable languages.\n\nExperience with relational databases, caching, messaging, containers or serverless systems, and infrastructure as code.\n\nPractical understanding of AI security risks, including prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, and excessive tool permissions.\n\nClear written communication, reliable project estimation, and experience delivering independently within an agreed scope.\n\nUseful additional experience\nEarly-stage startups with small engineering teams.\n\nAmazon Bedrock and direct model-provider APIs.\n\nAgent frameworks and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations.\n\nRetrieval systems, vector search, personalization, or multimodal AI.\n\nModel routing, inference optimization, and cost measurement per user or completed task.\n\nTypical project deliverablesDepending on the engagement, deliverables may include:\n\nAn architecture assessment and prioritized recommendations.\n\nA target architecture, documented tradeoffs, and phased implementation plan.\n\nWorking prototypes or production components for critical capabilities.\n\nInfrastructure code, deployment configuration, and operational runbooks.\n\nPerformance, reliability, AI quality, and cost benchmarks.\n\nEngineering handoff documentation and knowledge-transfer sessions.\n\nSuccess means delivering systems that meet agreed requirements, fit our stage and budget, and can be maintained by our team.\nCandidates worldwide are welcome. North American time zones are preferred, but we’re open to candidates elsewhere who can provide suitable working-hour overlap.\nOriginally posted on Himalayas","description_format":"text","description_chars":4818,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","EdTech Platforms","Education AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-05T23:28:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":34,"reasons":["seen:3","velocity","win:early","comp:remote"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/marcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/marcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T22:11:49Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11468,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":449918},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=449918"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmarcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmarcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmarcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/marcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmarcopolo-learning-contract-systems-architect-ai-aws-consumer-platforms"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3842944}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"marcopololearning.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3842944},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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