Software Architect, Backend

In the time it takes you to read this job description, RapidSOS will have handled ~1,380 emergencies.

At RapidSOS, we are committed to using technology to build a safer, stronger future and working together to save lives. We’re in an exciting phase of growth, welcoming new members from across the globe to our mission-driven, ambitious, and inclusive team. Our work is founded on our values of trust and safety, pioneering, urgency, and purpose over pride, all of which support a company culture where people can innovate, collaborate, grow, and, above all, make an impact. If that sounds like an exciting opportunity, we want to hear from you!

RapidSOS is an intelligent safety platform that harnesses artificial and human intelligence to fuse life-saving data from 600M+ connected devices, apps, and sensors from 210+ global technology companies, then delivers it to over 22,000+ public safety agencies in 11 countries. Powered by RapidSOS HARMONY, the industry’s first purpose-built AI for public safety, RapidSOS empowers first responders with real-time intelligence and the situational awareness needed to help protect property and save lives. Learn more at www.RapidSOS.com.

What this role is about:
Are you passionate about designing reliable, scalable systems with real-world impact? At RapidSOS, we’re building the future of emergency response—our platform supported 171M+ emergencies last year alone, connecting people to critical help faster and smarter than ever.

As a Software Architect, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the systems, patterns, and technical direction behind this life-saving infrastructure. You’ll design and evolve a real-time, globally distributed platform connecting 600M+ devices, apps, and sensors to public safety. In this role, you’ll shape how AI, data, and critical infrastructure come together to support telecommunicators in their most urgent moments. Collaborating with engineering, AI, and product teams, you’ll lead architectural vision across distributed systems, high-throughput pipelines, real-time APIs, and AI-driven capabilities, ensuring our platform is fast, resilient, and intelligent. You’ll also champion an AI-forward approach and evangelize best practices to how we design, build, and operate software across the organization.

If you thrive at the intersection of large-scale systems, emerging technologies, and meaningful mission impact, this is your opportunity to shape the future of life-saving emergency technology on a global scale.

What you’ll do:

• Drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the next generation of RapidSOS UNITE— the platform that brings real time data and AI driven intelligence to public safety
• Lead strategic architectural decisions and align teams while designing real-time, low-latency systems that ingest, process, and respond to sensor, call, and AI data with high performance, scalability, and reliability across regions
• Design for global scale with cross-region deployments, failover strategies, and dynamic scaling during high-impact events
• Integrate AI into production systems, ensuring models are deployed, monitored, and continuously improved with real-world data
• Fuse multimodal data (e.g. voice, video, geospatial, sensor feeds) to support real-time decision-making for emergency services
• Iterate fast, identify and assess opportunities to enhance applications, refactor when new information shows a better path, and ensure the codebase stays clean, stable, and ready for continuous evolution
• Collaborate and lead architecture discussions in an agile environment with stakeholders across Engineering, GTM, Design, and Product to develop solutions for RapidSOS products
• Guide and mentor engineers in adopting architectural best practices and best-in-class software development practices, coding standards, and system observability principles like system patterns, performance, and observability
• Work directly with engineering teams and stay hands on in the codebase as you build and iterate on the solutions you design

What we’re looking for in our ideal candidate:

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience, including leading architectural initiatives, with deep expertise in Python
• Proven experience in designing and scaling distributed event-driven systems, ideally in real-time or mission-critical environments
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and infrastructure, stream processing, and AI/ML infrastructure
• Understanding of how to deploy and optimize LLMs and other models in production environments; ideally has experience building AI-driven features or using AI tools to enhance acceleration of development, and is proactive about leveraging emerging technologies
• Strong systems thinking, clear communication, and the ability to lead across technical domains
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases, especially GIS databases (PostGIS, MongoDB Atlas) and message bus systems (RabbitMQ, PubSub, Kafka)
• Highly self-motivated; ability to adapt, problem solve, and learn quickly in a fast-paced environment with a strong sense of ownership
• Strong understanding of coding best practices – ability to write clean, maintainable, and testable code
• Customer-centric mindset; cares deeply about delivering solutions that enable and delight customers while meeting product goals & thinking big picture from the holistic architectural perspective
• Ability and willingness to collaborate in-person a few times per quarter and support critical design reviews, or as needed (up to 10% travel annually)

Nice-to-have experience (but not required!):

• Experience designing active-active architectures to ensure continuous availability and reliability
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, including automated builds, testing, and deployment processes

What we offer:

• The chance to work with a passionate team on solving one of the largest challenges globally
• Competitive salary and benefits and equity participation
• A dynamic, flexible and fun start-up work environment with a highly talented team

If you're curious to learn more about RapidSOS, you can check out https://rapidsos.com/blog/

Starting pay for a successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include experience, relevant skills, training, education, location, business needs, or market demands. The salary range for this role is $215,000 - $240,000. This role will also be eligible to receive equity options. #LI-Remote