MarcoPolo is an award-winning educational media company for children ages 3-7. Based in London with offices in New York and Shanghai, MarcoPolo produces broadcast-quality STEAM and English Language Learning curriculum for both home and school. Backed by Seedcamp.
About the role
We’re an AI-focused consumer technology startup building products designed to reach a large user base. We’re looking for an experienced Systems Architect to help us make practical technical decisions, deliver reliable AI capabilities, and establish infrastructure that can grow with the business. This is a project-based contract role. Each engagement will have an agreed scope, timeline, deliverables, and acceptance criteria. Follow-on projects may be available as our needs evolve. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- Assess our product requirements, existing architecture, and infrastructure, identify risks, bottlenecks, and priorities
- Design AWS architectures for consumer applications, including APIs, compute, storage, databases, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing
- Evaluate AI models and providers against representative workloads, balancing output quality, latency, reliability, privacy, and cost
- Design AI capabilities such as retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, tool use, and agent orchestration where they improve the product
- Establish production controls for AI workflows, including evaluations, tracing, execution limits, retries, fallbacks, and appropriate human approval
- Address consumer platform needs such as authentication, authorization, user data protection, traffic spikes, abuse prevention, and responsive user experiences
More about this role
Contract Systems Architect — AI, AWS & Consumer Platforms
Engagement: Project-based independent contractor
Schedule: Flexible, with agreed overlap with our team
About us
We’re an AI-focused consumer technology startup building products designed to reach a large user base. We’re looking for an experienced Systems Architect to help us make practical technical decisions, deliver reliable AI capabilities, and establish infrastructure that can grow with the business.
This is a project-based contract role. Each engagement will have an agreed scope, timeline, deliverables, and acceptance criteria. Follow-on projects may be available as our needs evolve.
The role
You’ll work directly with founders and engineers to translate product goals into secure, scalable, and cost-effective systems. Your work may span architecture reviews, AWS infrastructure, AI model integration, agentic workflows, and production readiness.
You should be comfortable moving from architecture diagrams to code, prototypes, infrastructure configuration, and technical reviews. We value clear judgment: knowing what to build now, what to defer, and when a simpler design will serve the business better.
What you’ll do
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