What are the responsibilities and job description for the Solutions Architect position at TOPSYS IT?
Job Title: Lead Solution Architect – Financial Services & Mainframe Modernization
Location: Remote
Long Term Contract
About Us
We are an ambitious, fast-growing startup built to tackle one of the most complex challenges in fintech: helping financial institutions break free from legacy infrastructure. Our core product transforms and migrates complex data and workloads from legacy mainframe systems to high-performance, modern cloud architectures. We are looking for a founding Lead Solution Architect to design our target technology landscape, drive customer migrations, and guide our product team in building scalable modernization tools.
Role Overview
As our Lead Solution Architect, you will own the end-to-end technical strategy for migrating high-volume, mission-critical financial data from legacy mainframes (COBOL, DB2, VSAM, EBCDIC formats) to modern cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP, relational/NoSQL databases, and event-driven architectures).
You will bridge the gap between deep mainframe concepts and modern cloud-native systems, serving as both a client-facing architect and an internal product key contributor.
Key Responsibilities
- Architecture & Strategy: Design resilient, scalable cloud architectures for complex mainframe data conversion and real-time/batch migration pipelines in compliance with banking regulations (SOC2, PCI-DSS, GDPR).
- Data Transformation & Ingestion: Architect high-throughput Change Data Capture (CDC) and ETL/ELT pipelines capable of parsing legacy mainframes, schema mapping, data validation, and automated reconciliation.
- Client Engagement: Lead technical discovery sessions with financial services clients, assess legacy mainframe landscapes, and define cloud migration roadmaps.
- Product Collaboration: Translate client migration pain points into automated features for our core migration engine, partnering closely with engineering and product leaders.
- Data Integrity & Governance: Design automated reconciliation, auditability, and data lineage mechanisms to guarantee 100% precision for mission-critical financial ledgers and records.
- Required Qualifications
Domain
Key Experience & Technical Requirements
Mainframe Knowledge
Hands-on background with legacy data structures (VSAM, DB2, Flat Files, EBCDIC encoding, Copybooks) and migration patterns from mainframe environments (IBM z/OS).
Data Modernization
Proven expertise in CDC (Change Data Capture) technologies (e.g., Debezium, Qlik, IBM InfoSphere), Kafka, Spark, and modern databases (PostgreSQL, Snowflake, MongoDB).
Cloud Infrastructure
5 years designing enterprise architectures on AWS, Azure, or GCP using microservices, containers (Docker/Kubernetes), and serverless patterns.
Financial Services
Strong grasp of financial data standards, transactional consistency (ACID vs. eventual consistency), data security, encryption, and regulatory compliance.
Track Record
7 years of experience in solution architecture or technical leadership, preferably within fintech, enterprise SaaS, or digital transformation consulting.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with automated code translation, AI-assisted migration tools, or reverse-engineering COBOL business logic into Java/Python/Go.
- Former experience at an early-stage startup or fast-growing B2B enterprise SaaS vendor.
- Cloud or Architecture Certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or TOGAF or equivalent).
- High Impact: Shape the core product architecture and engineering culture from the ground up.