Factbird helps manufacturers turn real-time production data into decisions they can actually act on. Since 2016, we've helped manufacturers in 28 countries cut waste, boost uptime, and run smarter — from the shop floor to the boardroom. Over 300 companies trust us to make sense of their operations, and we're a team of 80+ people across Copenhagen and the US who care about making complex things simple.

We're creating a new role at the top of our Engineering career ladder: Lead Architect. It's the senior end of our Technical Track — the rung above Tech Lead — and today it's a role we've deliberately left lightly defined, because we want the first person in it to help define it. You'll set Factbird's technical direction: architecture, tooling, and the multi-year technology bets that shape where the product goes next.

This is our most senior technical role, with no direct reports — your authority comes from judgment and track record, not the org chart. You'll work alongside our Tech Leads in Factbird's technical leadership group, partner closely with our Director of Engineering, and be the person other senior engineers go to when a decision is genuinely hard to reverse.

As Lead Architect, you own Factbird's company-wide technical vision: the architecture our services run on, the tooling and standards our engineers use every day, and the multi-year technology strategy that ties it all together. You make — or sign off on — the high-stakes, hard-to-reverse architecture calls, and you're accountable for getting them right with the full context of where the business is headed, not just where the code is today.

You'll work across a team built on Rust, React, Node.js, and AWS, with AI-assisted development already a core part of how we ship. Some of what this role owns is already well-defined — reviewing RFCs, stewarding language and platform standards, setting the team's AI-tooling strategy. Some of it isn't yet: Factbird is still a growing company, and part of the job is helping us figure out what technical leadership at this level should look like as we scale.

You'll thrive here if you'd rather be trusted with genuinely hard calls than manage a team, and if you can hold both the technical detail and the commercial context — cost, risk, market direction — well enough to make a technology bet you can still defend a year later.

What you'll do

Architecture & technical strategy

Own Factbird's multi-year technology strategy, and make the high-stakes architecture calls that are hard to reverse — with cost, risk, and business context factored in, not just engineering elegance
Author and drive major RFCs from proposal through to an actual decision, and review the highest-risk architecture changes across the team
Act as steward for our core languages and frameworks — setting standards, library choices, and the platform's overall shape
Make build-vs-buy calls for new technical capabilities, and bring a clear point of view on emerging technologies worth adopting
Define the observability, reliability, and security posture the platform is held to

Tooling & standards

Set the team's technical tooling and platform standards, and keep them evolving as the stack and the company grow
Define Factbird's strategy for AI-assisted development — which tools we adopt, how we balance velocity against code quality, security, and IP risk, and where we draw the line
Shape engineering-wide quality philosophy and help set the technical bar used in hiring interviews
Help define shared components and reference architecture that other engineers build on, rather than reinvent
Give input into technical org design and team topology as Engineering scales

Technical leadership & mentorship

Act as the trusted technical advisor to our Director of Engineering and the technical leadership group, partnering with Tech Leads and Product Leads on cross-team alignment
Mentor senior engineers and Tech Leads toward architect-level thinking, without formal ownership of their people management
Communicate technical vision and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including leadership
Identify technical risks to the business early, and say so before they become expensive
Represent Factbird's technical thinking externally where it makes sense — a talk, a blog post, an open-source contribution — though this isn't a requirement on day one

We're looking for someone who's already earned this kind of trust somewhere else — someone whose technical opinions carry weight because they're right more often than not, and who'd rather solve the interesting, ambiguous problem than manage the team solving it.

The ideal background

8+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including real time spent as an architect or equivalent senior technical authority, not just a senior engineer with a bigger title
A track record of owning multi-year technology strategy or platform architecture decisions that other teams had to live with — and that held up
Has led major RFCs or architecture proposals cross-team, through genuine pushback, to an actual decision
Comfortable making build-vs-buy and technology-adoption calls that account for cost, risk, and where the market is heading, not just what's technically interesting
Experience mentoring senior engineers or Tech Leads toward architect-level thinking, without needing formal authority to do it
Practical, current experience with AI-assisted development, and a clear point of view on where it genuinely helps versus where it creates risk

Factbird

Lead Architect

About the Job

Requirements

Responsibilities

About the Company

Factbird

Recently Posted Jobs