Solution Architect Needed to Audit Our Platform and Deliver a Technical Improvement Roadmap

We're a Series A SaaS company and our product is doing well, but we're about to invest heavily in our next phase of growth and we want an experienced outside perspective before we commit engineering time and budget. Our platform works today, yet we have growing concerns about scalability, reliability, rising cloud costs, and whether our current architecture can support our roadmap — including the AI features we want to add over the next year. We're looking for a senior solution architect to audit our existing setup and deliver a clear, prioritized roadmap of improvements that our team can actually execute, with or without your continued involvement. Scope of this engagement: Review our architecture, codebase structure, data model, infrastructure, and deployment/CI-CD process Identify bottlenecks, scalability risks, security gaps, technical debt, and cost inefficiencies Assess how ready we are to scale and to add AI/LLM-powered features Deliver a written audit plus a prioritized roadmap separating quick wins from longer-term strategic work, with rough effort and impact for each item Present the findings to our founders and engineering team and answer questions Our current stack: React and Next.js on the frontend, Node and Python on the backend, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Docker. Ideal candidate: 10+ years of experience, ideally having held a CTO or lead architect role Has scaled multi-tenant SaaS platforms and knows where they tend to break Strong on cloud cost optimization and deployment best practices Can evaluate AI/LLM readiness from an architecture standpoint Communicates trade-offs clearly to both engineers and non-technical founders This is a defined audit engagement to start, but if it goes well we'd be very open to bringing you on for the implementation phase or as an ongoing technical advisor.