LEAD PLATFORM ARCHITECH/ TECHNICAL LEAD 1099-PERM

KENTECH Consulting Inc. is an award-winning background technology screening company. We are the creators of innovative projects such as eKnowID.com, the first consumer background checking system of its kind, and ClarityIQ, a high-tech and high-touch investigative case management system.

MISSION
We're on a mission to help the world make clear and informed hiring decisions.

VALUE
In order to achieve our mission, our team exhibits the behaviors and core values aligned with it:

Customer Focused: We are customer-focused and results-driven.
Growth Minded: We believe in collaborative learning and industry best practices to deliver excellence.
Fact Finders: We are passionate investigators for discovery and truth.
Community and Employee Partnerships: We believe there is no greater power for transformation than delivering on what communities and employees care about.

The Opportunity

KENTECH is seeking a Lead Platform Architect / Technical Lead to design and personally help build the technical foundation of a new enterprise software platform.

This is not a traditional enterprise architect role.

It is not a meeting-heavy engineering management position.

And it is not a role where architecture is handed to another team to implement.

We are looking for a senior technologist who can move comfortably between:

business problem → system architecture → data model → API → code → deployment → debugging

The successful candidate will report directly to KENTECH's Founder & CEO and will have meaningful authority over technology architecture, engineering standards, technical decision-making, and the development of the initial engineering team.

Why This Role Is Different

Build — don't inherit

You will have the opportunity to establish the architecture of an important enterprise platform without inheriting years of technical debt or an inflexible legacy stack.

Real customers and real operating knowledge

KENTECH is not attempting to discover whether a market exists.

We have nearly two decades of operational experience, established customer relationships, proprietary intellectual property, and deep institutional knowledge of the problems our technology is designed to solve.

Direct access and authority

You will report directly to the Founder & CEO.

The organization is intentionally keeping the initial engineering team small so that decisions can be made quickly and strong engineers can have meaningful influence.

Help build the team

You will participate in selecting the engineers who will build alongside you and help establish the standards by which future engineers are hired.

Solve consequential problems

The systems we build operate in environments where security, auditability, reliability, data integrity, permissions, privacy, and operational accuracy matter.

What You Will Own

You will:

● Design the architecture of a secure, scalable, multi-tenant enterprise SaaS platform.
● Personally write production software alongside other senior engineers.
● Establish domain and data architecture.
● Design authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, and role-based permissions.
● Establish API and integration architecture.
● Design secure handling of sensitive information and documents.
● Establish auditability and transaction-history standards.
● Define cloud architecture and deployment strategy.
● Establish engineering standards, code-review practices, testing standards, and documentation expectations.
● Establish CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and production support practices.
● Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions.
● Identify and prevent architectural decisions that create unnecessary long-term technical debt.
● Evaluate existing technical assets and make recommendations regarding what should be retained, refactored, or replaced.
● Help recruit, interview, and mentor the initial engineering team.
● Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
● Establish an engineering culture centered on ownership, quality, speed, and accountability.

What We Are Looking For
Required Experience

● 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
● Significant experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Platform Architect, Technical Lead, or equivalent.
● Demonstrated experience designing and building production SaaS applications.
● Experience designing multi-tenant systems.
● Strong backend engineering expertise.
● Strong understanding of modern frontend and application architecture.
● Deep understanding of relational databases and data modeling.
● Experience designing APIs and enterprise integration patterns.
● Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, RBAC, and application security.
● Experience working with sensitive or regulated data.
● Experience building software within a compliance-oriented environment such as SOC 2, CJIS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, or an equivalent framework.
● Deep AWS experience designing and operating secure production systems in regulated environments.
● Experience establishing CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
● Experience with automated testing, monitoring, and production debugging.
● Ability to independently evaluate architectural tradeoffs.
● Demonstrated ability to personally write production-quality software.

Highly Valued Experience

Experience involving one or more of the following is valuable, but not required:

● AWS GovCloud experience, including deployment, migration, or operation of regulated workloads.
● GovTech
● Regulated enterprise SaaS
● Public-sector technology
● Security-sensitive applications
● Case or workflow management
● HR technology
● Investigative technology
● Document management
● Sensitive PII
● Enterprise integrations
● Event-driven architecture
● AI-assisted enterprise workflows

Technical Environment

The final technology stack will be established with the selected technical leader.

Candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern cloud-native environment that may include technologies such as:

● TypeScript / JavaScript
● React / Next.js
● Node.js or comparable backend technologies
● PostgreSQL
● AWS
● Docker
● Infrastructure as Code
● REST APIs
● CI/CD
● Automated testing
● Cloud monitoring and observability

We are not hiring based primarily on framework familiarity.

We care much more about:

architecture judgment · engineering depth · systems thinking · product judgment · security thinking · ability to ship

How You Will Spend Your Time

Initially, this position should remain highly technical.

Approximately:

● 60–70% architecture and hands-on engineering
● 20–25% technical leadership, design review, and code review
● 10–15% hiring, mentoring, planning, and technical strategy

As the organization grows, the leadership component may increase.

In the initial stage, however, we expect this person to remain close to the code.

What Success Looks Like

During your first several months, we expect you to:

● Understand KENTECH's business and operational environment.
● Assess existing technical assets.
● Establish a clear target architecture.
● Make core technology-stack decisions.
● Define platform, security, data, and integration architecture.
● Establish engineering environments and delivery processes.
● Introduce strong engineering and testing standards.
● Recruit or evaluate members of the initial engineering team.
● Begin delivering production-quality platform capabilities.
● Establish a repeatable foundation upon which additional products and capabilities can be built.

We care about momentum, but we do not confuse speed with shortcuts.

The objective is to create software that can grow with the company rather than architecture that has to be replaced as soon as the product succeeds.

The Person Who Will Thrive Here

You probably describe yourself as some combination of:

Principal Engineer · Staff Engineer · Platform Architect · Technical Lead · Lead Software Architect · Hands-On CTO

You like difficult systems problems.

You enjoy building more than presenting.

You can challenge a technical assumption without making the discussion political.

You understand the difference between something that needs to be architected correctly today and something that can wait.

You are comfortable taking ownership when the requirements are not perfectly defined.

And you become uncomfortable when architecture conversations continue indefinitely without working software being produced.

This Is Probably Not the Role for You If

Your recent experience consists primarily of:

● Engineering management without hands-on development
● Enterprise architecture presentations
● Project management
● Vendor management
● Solutions consulting
● Scrum or agile facilitation
● Low-code development
● Marketing websites
● Frontend-only development without substantial systems architecture

We are particularly interested in what you personally designed, coded, debugged, changed, and shipped, not simply what teams you managed.

Background Screening

KENTECH is a licensed private investigative and background screening company.

All employees are subject to a comprehensive background investigation as a condition of employment. Additional personnel-security requirements may apply depending on system access and customer requirements.

Why KENTECH

This role offers a combination that is difficult to find:

● An established company.
● Real customers.
● Proprietary domain knowledge.
● A greenfield technology opportunity.
● Direct access to the CEO.
● A small engineering team.
● And genuine authority to shape what gets built and how it gets built.

For the right engineer, this is an opportunity to do some of the most consequential work of their career.

This is a remote position.