Telco Architect - Remote US

Hiring a Telco Architect for an early-stage Silicon Valley startup building the workflow intelligence layer for AI compute. They have a live POC with a Tier-1 US carrier, and we're hiring the person who'll own it end-to-end.This is employee #4. You'll work directly with the CEO and Chief Architect, embed with the carrier, and turn a single deployment into a repeatable product — with a real path to running the telco vertical as its own business unit.What you'll do:Own the carrier POC end-to-end — discovery, telemetry extraction, and adapting the platform for telcoWork hands-on in the code alongside the engineering teamConvert the deployment into a repeatable product, then expand the accountUse it as a reference customer to open the next telco conversationsYou're a fit if you have:5+ years engineering experience, with real customer-facing time (Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect/Engineer, or equivalent)Hands-on experience with telco infrastructure (Ericsson EIAP, Nokia MantaRay, Samsung vRAN, rApps, etc.)Shipped into a Tier-1 carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, DT)Strong systems skills: Python, Kubernetes, containers, distributed systems, observability (Grafana, Prometheus)Comfort with server-level telemetry and real-time streaming dataThe instinct to thrive in ambiguous, early-stage, customer-facing workNice to have: commercial instincts, relationships into Tier-1/2 carriers or OEMs (Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung).This is a hands-on IC role — you'll be in the code, not managing a team (at least to start).