Cyclops

Lead technical strategy and solution design for complex commercial opportunities, collaborating across sales, product, and engineering teams. | Significant experience in solutions architecture or related technical consulting roles with strong technical fluency and communication skills. | Role Overview Cyclops is looking for a Lead Solutions Architect to be the technical force behind our most important commercial opportunities and help build the Solutions Architecture function from the ground up. Sitting within the Commercial GTM team, you’ll work closely with Sales, Product and Engineering to understand what prospective clients are trying to build, design the path forward and turn complex requirements into solutions that can actually be delivered. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can earn credibility with technical executives, go deep with engineering teams and keep sight of the commercial opportunity. Success means helping Cyclops win the right deals, reducing technical ambiguity before close and building the technical sales playbook that allows us to scale. Key Responsibilities • Lead technical strategy and discovery for Cyclops’s most important commercial opportunities, digging into client architecture, payment flows, integration requirements, operational needs and long-term objectives. • Partner with Sales as the senior technical counterpart throughout complex and strategic sales cycles, building credibility with engineering, product and executive stakeholders and helping move opportunities forward. • Design solution architectures and opportunity landscape assessments that connect client needs to Cyclops’s capabilities while surfacing dependencies, risks, blockers and gaps early. • Shape the path from opportunity to implementation, ensuring proposed solutions are technically sound, commercially viable and grounded in what Cyclops can successfully deliver. • Bring together the right leaders and subject-matter experts across Product, Engineering and other teams to answer hard questions, validate feasibility and find a path forward when the solution is not immediately obvious. • Translate between technical and commercial teams, making complex requirements understandable, actionable and aligned across both internal and client stakeholders. • Own the technical transition from commercial opportunity to implementation, ensuring Client Success has the context, requirements, decisions and risks needed to move quickly after close without restarting discovery. • Build the Solutions Architecture function from the ground up, creating the discovery frameworks, solution standards, templates, tools and feedback loops that help Cyclops qualify opportunities, design better solutions and scale technical sales. Required Qualifications • Significant experience in solutions architecture, solutions engineering, sales engineering, technical consulting or another customer-facing technical role supporting complex or strategic clients. • A track record of leading technical discovery and solution design for complex enterprise or strategic opportunities from early evaluation through a clear path to implementation. • Strong technical fluency across APIs, integrations, systems architecture and data flows. You do not need to write production code every day, but you need to be able to go deep with engineering teams and earn credibility with technical leaders. • Demonstrated ability to take complex or ambiguous business and technical requirements and turn them into clear, practical and scalable solution approaches. • The ability to operate as a trusted technical advisor while maintaining strong commercial judgment and keeping sight of the broader business opportunity. • Exceptional communication skills and the ability to influence and communicate effectively with engineers, product leaders, commercial teams and senior executives. • High ownership, strong judgment and a bias toward action, with the ability to drive complex decisions and bring the right people together without relying on formal authority. • Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment where the playbook may not exist yet, and the experience and instinct to build it. Preferred Experience • Experience in payments, fintech, stablecoins, banking infrastructure or other complex financial technology environments. • Experience supporting enterprise, strategic or technically complex sales cycles for API-first or infrastructure products. • Familiarity with payment flows, including pay-ins, payouts, settlement and treasury operations. • Experience creating solution architectures, integration strategies and technical opportunity assessments for complex clients. • Experience building or scaling a Solutions Architecture, Solutions Engineering or technical pre-sales function at an early-stage company.. Reporting Structure (Optional) Reports to the Director of Business Development, with a strong working relationship across Product and Engineering. You’ll serve as the senior technical partner across the Sales team, working wherever your involvement can help unlock, accelerate or de-risk an opportunity. As Cyclops grows, you’ll help define how the Solutions Architecture function scales and have the opportunity to shape the team and operating model around what the business needs. Location (Optional) Location: Fully Remote We are open to candidates based within the U.S. Eastern Time or Central European Time Zones. Compensation and Benefits We offer competitive compensation designed to attract exceptional talent and reflect the experience, skills, and impact you'll bring to the team. Depending on the role, candidate location, and final engagement structure, this position may be structured as either direct employment or an independent contractor engagement. Compensation, benefits, and other terms will be aligned with the applicable engagement type and discussed during the hiring process. Additional Benefits • Company issued laptop • Technology Accessories • Annual In-Person Full-Team Meetup

Design and maintain reliable backend platform services with technical leadership and ownership of complex systems. | 6+ years backend development, deep crypto infrastructure experience, strong TypeScript/Node.js skills, distributed system design, production incident handling, and mentoring abilities. | Role Overview This is a Senior Software Engineer role with a Technical Leadership / Platform specialization, focused on system design, reliability, and long-term platform evolution. You will help the team understand how our systems should behave under load, during failures, and as they scale, ensuring the platform foundation remains healthy over time. The role involves a significant architectural focus (30-50%) while remaining fully hands-on: you take ownership of the most complex or high-risk backend work, and act as the technical representative for API/SDK integrations with third-party vendors and clients, during and after the integration. Key Responsibilities • Design and evolve core platform services, focusing on reliability, data integrity, and clear service boundaries aligned with business requirements • Identify architectural risks, scalability limits, and weak points before they become production issues; recognize when existing tools (queues, storage, frameworks) reach their limits and propose pragmatic, incremental improvement or migration paths • Own the technical relationship with partners as the primary technical point of contact: lead solution reviews, troubleshooting, and roadmap alignment; document technical decisions and integration details; ensure partners understand expectations, timelines, and constraints • Design and improve reliability mechanisms: retries and backoff, timeouts and idempotency, handling of partial failures, degraded and fallback modes • Drive improvements in observability (metrics, logs, tracing, operational visibility) and participate in production incident analysis • Contribute during the Discovery stage of projects: build PoCs, validate ideas, analyze third-party vendor APIs and proposed integration flows • Implement the most complex and high-risk backend components using TypeScript and Node.js, owning correctness under partial failure scenarios • Raise the overall technical maturity of the team, including senior engineers: thoughtful code reviews, decomposition of large or ambiguous problems, knowledge sharing through pairing and documentation Required Qualifications • 6+ years of professional backend development experience • Deep hands-on experience building and operating crypto infrastructure: custody, wallets, exchange, payment, or settlement systems. You have designed and run production systems that move real funds. Integrating a crypto API into an existing product, or building UI on top of one, does not meet this bar • Strong backend expertise in TypeScript and Node.js • Deep experience in distributed system design: microservices architecture, service boundaries and data models, REST APIs and API contracts, queues and asynchronous communication • Hands-on production experience: incident response, debugging, API failures, data issues • Experience owning services end-to-end, from design to production support • Excellent knowledge of SQL (PostgreSQL) and understanding of other storage types • Strong reliability mindset and experience with failure scenarios; experience improving observability and investigating production incidents • Proficient daily use of AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot), with the ability to review AI-generated code quickly and critically • Ability to mentor engineers, including senior-level, and to evaluate trade-offs and propose practical solutions • High agency: you treat problems in your scope as yours by default, act before being asked, and escalate with a proposed plan when a decision is above your level • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to bridge technical and business conversations; strong written and verbal English Preferred Experience • Experience leading architecture work across timezones in a distributed team • Experience in regulated financial environments (licensing, audits, compliance-driven engineering requirements) • Experience with queues and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.) • Redis or other in-memory data stores • Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS (user-level understanding) • Experience shaping team practices around AI-assisted development Reporting Structure Reports to the Engineering Manager. This role does not include direct people management, only technical influence. Why This Role • Own the technical foundation of a crypto payment platform being built now: architecture decisions you make will define the platform for years • Full technical ownership of the highest-risk, highest-impact work in the company, with direct influence on how the whole engineering organization builds • AI-first engineering culture where your leverage multiplies through the team Location Remote. USA, Argentina, or Brazil. The role works US business hours (Eastern Time). A minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with Central European working hours is a requirement. Compensation and Benefits As an independent contractor, you'll enjoy the flexibility to determine how and when you deliver your work, while partnering closely with our team to meet agreed milestones and business objectives. Compensation and engagement terms will be outlined in your contractor agreement. Additional Benefits • Company issued laptop • Technology Accessories • Annual In-Person Full-Team Meetup