Architect

Faro Health aims to improve lives by helping life sciences companies design optimal clinical trials. Our AI-powered software platform optimizes and orchestrates complex clinical development by providing powerful insights about trial design and outcomes. Faro empowers researchers to design more intelligent trials, reducing development costs and reaching milestones faster with better patient experiences.

Faro is a mission-driven company seeking world-class people who share our passion for improving drug availability and patient outcomes through better clinical trial design. We pride ourselves on our vibrant, inclusive, and growth mindset oriented culture. Faro offers competitive compensation and benefits, generous vacation and parental leave, and flexible working hours.

We are a hybrid workplace where San Diego employees work from their homes as well as in our stunning main headquarters enjoying a gym with classes, outdoor lawn work area, and steeply discounted food hall. Remote employees work from home and visit the main office for group events and in-person collaboration.

In this role you'll design and build the platform capabilities that Faro's product teams build on top of. Your consumers are internal engineering teams and business stakeholders, so the work is measured by adoption as much as delivery. The systems you design succeed when other teams choose them. You'll stay hands-on — expect to spend a meaningful share of your time in code, prototyping your own designs and building reference implementations of the patterns you're asking teams to adopt.

The platform is your domain, and you own its architecture end to end. Beyond it, you'll provide architectural oversight across product development, participating in architecture reviews and partnering with feature leads to guide their technical designs into alignment with the wider system. Working alongside other architects and engineers, you'll own trade-offs that cross team boundaries and help steer modernization already in flight. It's a role with unusual leverage: a good decision here compounds across every engineering team in the company.

Responsibilities:

• Own System Design: Lead the design of large-scale, cross-team platform capabilities from ideation to release, ensuring business requirements are gathered and met.
• Own Non-Functional Requirements: Ensure that all non-functional requirements, including performance, scalability, reliability, security, observability, and cost are met across your domain.
• Sequence Architecture Into Delivery: Partner with engineering managers and product to break your designs into increments teams can actually ship, so no team is blocked waiting on a design that doesn't exist yet.
• Architectural Review: Write, critique, and defend designs (your own and others'), including identifying and validating reversible-vs-irreversible decisions.
• Build-vs-Buy Evaluation: Evaluate and make recommendations on build-vs-buy decisions for new or aging features and capabilities.
• Hands-On Innovation: Contribute directly to the architecture and development of high-complexity features, tackling challenging problems.
• Champion Best Practices: Be a driving force in establishing and promoting engineering best practices, partnering with our Principal Architect to turn what works in your domain into standards the whole organization can adopt.
• Mentor & Lead: Mentor engineers across the organization, helping to accelerate the realization of our product roadmap while fostering a collaborative learning environment.
• Drive Adoption With Internal Customers: Deliver an exceptional experience for the engineering teams and business stakeholders who build on your systems, understanding their needs deeply enough that they choose your platform rather than route around it.
• Represent Architecture Externally: Present our architecture to strategic customers and engage their technical leadership directly — including on limitations and our roadmap.

What We're Looking For. We don't expect anyone to bring all of this. If the first group describes you, and you recognize yourself in many of the others, we'd like to talk.

Scope and Judgment

• You have designed systems used by multiple teams and managed the long-term consequences
• You have led a migration or deprecation to completion including full retirement
• You can distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions and calibrate how much process each deserves
• You have driven technical alignment among senior engineers who don't report to you and didn't initially agree with you
• You have partnered with engineering managers to get architectural work onto a roadmap and delivered incrementally
• You have made and defended build-vs-buy recommendations
• You have prioritized and pitched tech debt: what to accumulate, what to hold, what to pay down, and what to retire
• You have owned the security posture of systems you designed, and worked with security teams as a partner
• You have made architectural decisions with real cost consequences, both positive and negative, and can explain the outcomes
• You have presented an architecture to a customer's technical leadership and held the room through hard questions

Technical Depth

• Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose application language and one infrastructure-as-code toolchain. We work primarily with containers running TypeScript or Python on Azure, with Terraform as IaC.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture and cloud operations
• Experience running containerized workloads. We are migrating to AKS.
• Experience designing data models on relational stores (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or similar), including schema evolution in production
• Experience designing real-time data or event-driven systems
• Experience designing integrations across product boundaries including versioned interfaces, compatibility guarantees, and failure isolation
• Experience designing front-end architecture at scale including component libraries, state management, and design-system and module boundaries

Ways of Working

• A track record of mentoring engineers
• Excellent written and verbal communication: you move between engineers, executives, and customers in the same day, adopting each audience's vocabulary without diluting the substance
• Equally comfortable leading small, short-lived cross-team groups and working independently
• Comfortable in a fast-moving, growth-minded environment where requirements change
• You teach what you learn and are comfortable learning from others regardless of seniority

Strong Plus

• Familiarity with our stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, Redis, Agno, Vite, uv, Containers, Terraform, Azure
• Integrating AI/LLM capabilities into production systems, including validation of model outputs
• Designing systems under regulatory constraint: validation, audit trails, data integrity, traceability, attribution, etc.
• Clinical trials or regulated healthcare domain experience

Salary 

Salary range for this position is $188,000 - $221,000

Salary listed reflects the base salary only and does not include other elements of total compensation. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training 

Equity 

In addition to this position's salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation for this position. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance. 

Benefits 

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k)
• Life Insurance (Basic)
• Short Term and Long Term Disability
• Paid Time Off (Flexible Vacation Policy; Paid Sick & Public Holidays Observed)
• Training & Development Reimbursement
• Hybrid Work Environment
• Peer-to-peer bonus program
• Company/department outings and events
• Stock Option Plan
• San Diego Office On-Premises Amenities; gym, restaurant tenant discount, Padel Nine