About Toptal
Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce.
We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.
Job Summary
We are looking for a Back-end Architect and Tech Lead to help drive the launch of a new, high-impact business line at Toptal. In this pivotal role, you’ll own the technical vision and turn napkin sketches into a resilient, scalable platform. This is a greenfield opportunity where you’ll shape architecture, guide early technical decisions, and work to bring an ambitious product to life. The decisions you make in the first 12 months will define the platform’s DNA, its velocity, and its capacity to serve thousands of customers.
Responsibilities:
- Set the end-to-end architecture: data storage, task orchestration, model-in-the-loop pipelines, multi-tenant, and observability.
- Drive every “build vs. buy” decision and seed the initial tech stack (cloud, languages, frameworks, infra-as-code).
- Prototype core services quickly
- Participate in the recruiting process, mentor, and unblock a small team of back-end, full-stack, and front-end engineers as the company scales.
- Partner with the Product Lead to translate fuzzy customer needs into clear, actionable technical requirements.
- Establish engineering culture, coding standards, and CI/CD from day one.
- Represent the technology narrative with stakeholders, design partners, and early enterprise customers.
Expectations for Growth
- First Week: Integrate into Toptal practices, participate in training, and set up your local development environment.
- First Month: Evaluate existing progress, identify technical bottlenecks, and contribute to architectural decision-making.
- First Three Months: Lead technical initiatives, define long-term roadmap scalability, and implement codebase improvements.
- First Six Months: Optimize the technology stack for strategic growth, balance technical debt, and mentor new team members.
- First Year: Scale the data-labeling engine and build a roadmap to achieve compliance.
Qualifications and Job Requirements:
- 10+ years designing and shipping distributed systems at scale.
- Fluency with a major cloud (e.g., GCP or AWS) plus a modern tech stack (Ruby/Rails, Python, Rust, Golang, Java etc.).
- Deep track record architecting large-scale, multi-tenant applications and platforms.
- Experience hiring, mentoring, and growing a small team of back-end, full-stack, and front-end engineers.
- Hands-on experience building zero-to-one products and navigating rapid iteration under ambiguity.
- Comfort pitching architecture to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders—and rolling up sleeves to write production code.
- A collaborative, founder-level mindset: bias to action, ownership over outcomes, and passion for elegant, pragmatic solutions.