Lead Solution Architect / Technical Lead — Multimodal AI Platform - Freelance

**Location:** Fully remote (Canada) **Duration:** Milestone-based freelance contract **Overview** An organization working with very large volumes of imagery, video, and audio is building a next-generation platform to help its experts make sense of it all. Currently, specialists review much of this material manually — finding what's relevant, transcribing audio, adding metadata, and organizing it for the long term. The work is high quality, but the volume is outgrowing what manual review can sustain. This platform will be a modular, multimodal AI system that performs first-pass analysis automatically — computer vision on imagery and video, speech-to-text on audio, and language models for summarization and metadata — then hands its findings to human experts who review, correct, and approve before anything is finalized. People stay firmly in control; the AI takes on the repetitive load. This is a hands-on architecture and leadership role. You'll take a genuinely hard problem — turning massive, messy, multimodal data streams into structured, searchable, human-validated intelligence — and shape it into a clean, modular, vendor-agnostic system. You'll set the technical direction, make the build-vs-buy calls, and lead four other senior engineers to a working prototype. **Key Responsibilities** - Design the overall architecture — modular, configurable, vendor-agnostic, API-first — with the system, interface, and data-flow designs to back it up - Create the plan for swapping AI services (vision, speech, language) in and out behind standardized interfaces, with no rewrites - Conduct iterative design reviews with stakeholders; refine requirements and keep direction tight as the build evolves - Define the security and accessibility posture, by design — authentication, authorization, encryption, and auditing, plus WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, baked in from day one - Integrate four engineers' work into one prototype and drive milestones to delivery - Serve as the technical owner of the entire platform — the person who decides how all the moving parts fit together, and holds the design to a high bar **Required Qualifications** - 8+ years designing and shipping enterprise or cloud-native systems, with clear architecture ownership on real products - At least one AI-enabled platform you architected that integrated third-party AI/ML or LLM services - Deep comfort with modular, service-oriented, API-first design and interchangeable components - A track record leading distributed engineering teams to on-time delivery - Links, case studies, or references for comparable systems you've delivered **Preferred Qualifications** - Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent/tool orchestration patterns - Experience delivering complex software systems for government or regulated industries; familiarity with SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / NIST controls - Containerization/Kubernetes and large-scale data architectures **Work Location & Requirements** - Fully remote position - Must be based in Canada and able to contract as an independent professional - Freelance / independent contractor engagement (not employment) - Selection is two steps: a review of your background and past work, then a short technical assessment / coding exercise