Founding Software Architect (Mission Control) - Fulltime - US-based

About the company

Mission Control is the AI backend of a human-led, service-as-software company. A client submits a mission (a goal, their data, rules and constraints). A governed team of AI agents then plans, researches, analyzes, simulates, challenges and assembles a verified, evidence-backed decision package. Every material claim traces back to evidence, and an expert partner signs off before anything is delivered.

We launch with three mission templates: robotics and physical-AI deployment readiness, data-center site readiness and construction, and aerospace manufacturing. New verticals are added as configuration, not rebuilds. One codebase runs three ways: hosted (multi-tenant, multi-region across the US, GCC and EU), inside a client's own cloud, or fully air-gapped on client hardware.

The role

You are the first engineering hire. You own the technical design of the Mission Control core and make the final engineering calls. You build hands-on from day one, and you lead a team of about eight engineers (backend / platform, AI / agent, infrastructure / security, full-stack) as they join.

The target: a working core on all three deployment targets within the first three months, then three production templates and first design-partner missions by month six.

What you'll do

• Turn our architecture requirements and prototype PRD into the system architecture
• Make the open stack decisions: agent framework (e.g. LangGraph, NVIDIA AI-Q / NeMo Agent Toolkit or alternatives), durable execution (e.g. Temporal), multi-tenant sandboxing, evidence-ledger storage and GPU sizing for open-weight models
• Design and build the core: the mission object and lifecycle state machine, approval gates (G0–G6) enforced as policy-as-data, a kill switch, the planner and configurable agent roles, checkpoint / resume for missions that run hours to weeks, and budget metering
• Design the append-only evidence ledger, claim-to-evidence tracing and an independent verification layer that enforces our evidence standard
• Architect one codebase for three targets: multi-tenant hosted with per-tenant keys and strict isolation; single-tenant client cloud with client-held keys; air-gapped with offline install and update packages and zero outbound network calls
• Build the model gateway that routes work across frontier and open-weight models by capability, cost, data class and policy
• Set coding, security and review standards; design toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 from day one, and keep the architecture ready for export-control (ITAR) requirements: US-persons-only access, US-resident compute and FIPS-validated encryption as configurable policy
• Hire and lead the engineering team through the core build, working closely with the product / operations lead and our forward-deployed engineers

Must have

• Staff-level engineering experience (typically 8+ years), including technical leadership of a team
• Has shipped and operated production distributed systems
• Has led the architecture of a multi-tenant SaaS product, including tenant isolation and per-tenant data security
• Hands-on experience building LLM agent systems in production: orchestration, tool use, evaluation
• Strong Kubernetes / container experience; designs for portability across cloud providers
• Solid security fundamentals: RBAC / SSO, encryption and key management, audit logging, tenant isolation
• Wants to build hands-on at a pre-seed company, not only direct others
• Based in the US

Nice to have

• Has architected an on-prem, air-gapped or single-tenant self-hosted product (offline install and updates, customer-held keys)
• Experience at a forward-deployed-engineering (FDE) model company
• Deployments in regulated industries: government, defense, critical infrastructure (FedRAMP, ITAR, SOC 2)
• Durable workflow engines (e.g. Temporal) and append-only or event-sourced data stores
• Serving open-weight models on customer GPUs
• Domain exposure to robotics, data centers / construction or aerospace manufacturing
• Eligible to access export-controlled (ITAR) technical data

Why join

• A true founding role: you define the architecture and the engineering culture
• Hard, unusual problems: governed multi-agent systems, evidence-traced outputs, and sovereign deployment from one codebase
• Real missions with paying design partners within six months