What are the responsibilities and job description for the Lead Architect Java/Spring Boot, Cloud position at Photon?
We are seeking a Lead Architect who can own system architecture end-to-end and clearly articulate design decisions, technology choices, and tradeoffs to senior stakeholders. This role requires deep hands-on technical expertise combined with strong technical communication and leadership capabilities. The ideal candidate should be comfortable leading architecture discussions, guiding teams, and influencing platform direction.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead architecture design for complex, largescale backend and platform systems, with ownership across application, integration, data, and cloud layers.
- Drive architecture and design clarity, focusing on longterm scalability, performance, security, and resiliency rather than pure feature development.
- Clearly articulate architecture decisions, design patterns, and tradeoffs to engineers, product teams, and senior client stakeholders.
- Define and govern technology standards, design guidelines, and engineering best practices across teams.
- Review, challenge, and approve highlevel and lowlevel technical designs.
- Lead technical discussions with client architects and senior engineering leadership, influencing platform direction and roadmap decisions.
- Evaluate and recommend tools, frameworks, and cloud services aligned with platform strategy.
- Support delivery teams by resolving complex technical challenges and architectural risks.
- Mentor senior engineers and tech leads to raise overall architectural maturity of the organization.
Required Qualifications
- 10 years of overall software engineering experience with 3 4 years in an architecture or lead role.
- Strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, microservices, and API-driven architectures.
- Strong experience designing distributed systems and enterprise-scale platforms.
- Deep experience with cloud architectures (Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or AWS).
- Strong knowledge of architecture and design patterns.
- Experience with CI/CD, DevOps practices, and release architecture.
- Excellent technical communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
- Proven ability to lead architecture discussions and defend design decisions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in regulated enterprise environments (Healthcare, BFSI, Retail).
- Experience with Kafka, Pub/Sub, or event-driven architectures.
- Knowledge of observability, performance tuning, and production readiness.
- Experience collaborating directly with client architecture teams.
- Experience in cloud migration or platform modernization initiatives.