Platform Architect

We are currently searching for a Platform Lead / Architect for a contract opportunity with our client located in Palo Alto, CA

This position is 100% Onsite.

The contract term is open and possibility of conversion to full time with client.

About the role

Our client is an early-stage, stealth-mode startup building a healthcare-focused AI platform with signed SOWs and active client engagements.

We are looking for a Platform Lead / Architect to be the technical owner of this platform from the ground up for our client: someone who can design the architecture, write the code and infrastructure that brings it to life, and stand up the security and compliance posture a healthcare platform requires.

This is a hands-on role. You will be the most senior platform engineer on the team and the person responsible for translating an existing v0.1 architecture document into a production system. You will work directly with the founding team and a small group of engineers, in person, in our client’s Bay Area office in Palo Alto, CA

What you will do

• Build the platform end to end. Take a v0.1 architecture from concept to production: AWS account structure, networking, data ingestion, processing pipelines, model serving, application APIs, and the operational layer that runs underneath all of it.
• Build, not just design. Write production code and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK). Stand up the first environments yourself. Make the early technical decisions that the rest of the platform will be built on.
• Set the security and compliance foundation. Lead the design and implementation of HIPAA-aligned infrastructure: BAA inventory, PHI handling, de-identification strategy, encryption, IAM and least-privilege access, audit logging, incident response readiness.
• Architect the data platform. Build ingestion and processing for high-frequency multimodal sensor data (ECG, IMU, EEG, video, FHIR, and more), feeding a foundation-model-based AI stack with vector search and clinical prediction outputs.
• Establish engineering practice. Set up the GitHub workflow, CI/CD, environments (dev, staging, prod), secrets management, observability, on-call posture, and the documentation that lets the team scale safely.
• Partner closely with the founding team. Translate product and clinical requirements into platform decisions. Push back where the architecture needs to push back. Be the technical voice in the room when investors, clients, and auditors ask hard questions.
• Mentor and lead. Bring along the existing team through code review, pairing, and architecture review. Set the bar for what good looks like.

What we are looking for

Must-haves

• AWS healthcare and HIPAA experience in production. You have personally built and operated systems that handle PHI on AWS. You understand BAAs (and which AWS services are HIPAA-eligible), VPC isolation, KMS, IAM at a serious level, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and what an audit actually looks like in practice.
• Streaming and sensor or IoT data pipeline experience. You have built ingestion and processing for high-frequency, multi-source time-series data. Kinesis, Kafka, or equivalent. You understand the realities of clock sync, sampling-rate variance, schema evolution, and data quality at the edges of the pipeline.
• Hands-on platform engineering depth. You write production-quality code (Python, Go, or TypeScript) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK). You are comfortable being the person who actually ships the first version.
• Architectural judgment. You can hold the whole system in your head, make the right tradeoffs between simplicity and scale, and know when to defer decisions versus when to make them now.
• Onsite, Bay Area, full-time in office. This role is in-person, five days a week, with the founding team.

Strong pluses

• ML and AI infrastructure experience: model serving on GPUs, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS), feature stores, model registries, inference latency optimization.
• SOC 2 or HITRUST audit experience as a builder, not just a reviewer.
• Startup or 0-to-1 platform build experience: comfort with ambiguity, willingness to own things outside the strict job description.
• Familiarity with healthcare data standards (HL7, FHIR, DICOM) and clinical data workflows.
• Experience with multimodal AI systems (sensor video structured data) and the data engineering challenges they create.

How our client works

• Small, senior team. You will be working directly with the founders and a tight group of engineers. Decisions get made quickly and you will be in the room for them.
• In-person, in the Bay Area. We believe building a platform from scratch in a regulated domain benefits from being together in one room, every day.
• Active client engagements. Our client has already got signed SOWs and real customers waiting on what they build. The work matters, and the timelines are real.
• High autonomy, high accountability. We expect you to drive your area. We will give you the context, the tools, and the trust to do it.

How to apply

Send a brief note about your background, links to systems you have built (GitHub, prior architecture work, or a description of a platform you owned end-to-end), and what draws you to a hands-on platform lead role at a stealth-mode healthcare startup.

Our client says – “We read every application personally and respond promptly”.

If interested, please send your resume and above requested note to

smurugesan@drishticon.com