Solution Architect

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect end-to-end payment and platform systems (on-premises, hybrid, cloud-native) that meet demands of low latency, high throughput, resilience, security, and data privacy.
• Define and promote architecture principles, reference models, patterns (e.g., microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, async & sync messaging, domain-driven design) and guide teams in adoption.
• Document architecture using modern modelling tools and techniques (e.g., C4, UML, deployment/sequence/data diagrams); ensure architecture artifacts are clear, actionable and accessible to engineering and product teams.
• Evaluate design trade-offs (latency vs throughput vs cost; consistency vs availability; complexity vs maintainability; security vs usability) and make decisions transparently.
• Be highly hands-on: able to dig into Java/Spring Boot microservices, event flows, integration architectures, observability, failure handling and recovery strategies.
• Collaborate closely with product leadership to translate roadmap items (e.g., tokenization, passkeys, BNPL) into architecture design, providing options, implications and trade-off analysis.
• Provide mentorship and leadership in architecture governance: review design proposals, perform risk assessments, drive architectural reviews, lead a Center of Excellence for architecture practices.
• Engage across engineering domains: partner with cloud, infrastructure, security, devops, data teams to ensure architecture meets cross-cutting non-functional requirements and is delivery-ready.
• Drive innovation: explore new open-source technologies, event frameworks, data streaming, AI/ML integration, real-time analytics and bring pragmatic proposals into the platform roadmap.
• Influence culture: promote architecture best practices, drive continuous improvement, contribute to knowledge-sharing forums, build architecture community within the organization.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 15 years of professional experience in software engineering and architecture roles, with extensive hands-on coding and systems design.
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot microservices, event-driven systems (e.g., using Kafka, Axon, etc.), synchronous and asynchronous communications, domain-driven design.
• Strong knowledge of distributed system design: high throughput, low latency, fail-fast, resilient architectures, graceful degradation, fault isolation.
• Experience in cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and hybrid cloud / on-prem integrations.
• Skilled in architecture modelling and documentation using modern tools and frameworks (C4, UML, etc.).
• Excellent understanding of integration patterns, messaging, service orchestration, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), caching, databases (SQL & NoSQL).
• Proven capability to articulate design trade-offs, influence senior stakeholders (engineering leads, product leadership, executives) and lead architecture decisions.
• Strong communication skills: ability to simplify complex architecture concepts, present to non-technical audiences (product/business) and collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
• Experience in payments, fintech, commerce platforms or similarly complex, regulated, high-scale systems is highly desirable.
• Proven track record of setting standards, leading architecture practice, mentoring teams, driving governance and improving architectural maturity in an organization.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional), CISSP or equivalent.
• Familiarity with DevOps/CI-CD practices, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation).
• Exposure to AI/ML, stream processing, real-time analytics platforms.
• Experience working in a product-engineering facing role in a payments/commerce environment, with exposure to tokenization, payment passkeys, BNPL etc