Staff Engineer – Application Architect

Staff Engineer – Application Architect

Location: Hybrid (Boston, MA area)

Department: Engineering

Reports To: VP of Engineering

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to serve as the application architect for FacilityGrid’s SaaS platform. This role owns the technical direction of our application layer — a PHP/Laravel backend, an Angular/TypeScript frontend, and supporting microservices — while maintaining working familiarity with the underlying cloud infrastructure and deployment platform. You will be the technical decision-maker for how our application systems evolve, ensuring architectural coherence across a growing codebase and team.

FacilityGrid is an AI-first company. We expect every team member to actively leverage AI-based tooling to work faster and solve problems more effectively. Candidates who already incorporate AI into their development workflow will stand out.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will write code, review designs, mentor engineers, and drive the technical strategy that enables FacilityGrid to scale its construction and facilities management platform.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Own the application architecture across backend, frontend, and service layers
• Evolve and maintain the layered patterns and conventions that govern the codebase
• Drive API design decisions across versioned REST endpoints
• Author and maintain Technical Design Documents for significant system changes
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and technology adoption proposals
• Establish and enforce coding standards, testing strategies, and review practices

Application Development

• Contribute production code in PHP/Laravel and TypeScript/Angular
• Design data models, migrations, and schema evolution strategies
• Architect integration patterns for external platforms and third-party APIs
• Design frontend state management and data-intensive UI patterns
• Optimize application performance across the full stack (caching, queues, CDN)

Platform Awareness

• Collaborate with platform engineering on deployment architecture and container orchestration
• Understand containerized build and CI/CD pipelines well enough to troubleshoot application-layer issues
• Participate in infrastructure design reviews involving GitOps workflows and infrastructure-as-code
• Contribute to observability strategy and application-level instrumentation

Mentorship & Team Development

• Mentor mid-level and senior engineers through code review, pairing, and design discussions
• Raise the technical bar across the engineering organization
• Translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and decomposed deliverables
• Bridge communication between product, engineering, and infrastructure teams

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Deep expertise in PHP/Laravel — you understand the framework internals, not just the API surface
• Strong experience with Angular or comparable TypeScript SPA frameworks
• Proven track record of designing and evolving application architectures at scale across multiple teams
• Experience with relational database design, query optimization, and migration management
• Familiarity with RESTful API design, OAuth2 authentication flows, and multi-tenant SaaS patterns
• Experience with containerized deployments (Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes)
• Strong written communication — you can author clear technical design documents and ADRs
• Willingness to use AI-based development tools as a core part of your workflow

Preferred

• Experience with construction, facilities management, or field-service SaaS domains
• Familiarity with construction management platform integrations (e.g., Procore)
• Experience with GitOps workflows and infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Background with RBAC systems and enterprise SSO/SCIM provisioning
• Experience with observability platforms and distributed tracing
• Experience leading large-scale platform migrations — merging separate applications, consolidating data models, or unifying multiple systems onto a single platform

Key Competencies

• Systems thinking — you see how changes ripple across layers and teams
• Pragmatic decision-making — you choose the right level of abstraction, not the most clever one
• Strong ownership — you drive outcomes, not just write code
• Effective communicator across technical and non-technical audiences
• Continuous improvement mindset with a bias toward simplicity

Why Join Us

• Define the technical direction of a growing SaaS platform in the construction/facilities space
• High-autonomy, high-impact role with direct influence on architecture and engineering culture
• Modern infrastructure stack with investment in developer experience and automation
• Opportunity to shape engineering practices and team growth from a senior technical position