Principal Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Own the Architectural Vision: Define and drive the long-term technical architecture for KAST, ensuring our platform evolves to meet the demands of high-throughput transactional volume.
• Design for Scale & Reliability: Lead the design and review of our distributed systems, ensuring our microservices architecture is built for fault tolerance, high availability, and massive scalability on AWS.
• Optimize Transactional Flows: architect critical path systems, including our payment processing, ledger management, and financial data consistency models, ensuring sub-millisecond performance and auditability.
• Establish Engineering Standards: Define architecture principles, coding standards, and deployment patterns (CI/CD, IaC) that enable autonomous microservices teams to ship code safely and rapidly.
• Cloud-Native Strategy: Lead our AWS strategy, optimizing resource utilization, latency, and cost while leveraging managed services to improve developer velocity.
• Drive Security & Compliance: Integrate security-by-design principles into our architecture, ensuring that our transaction-heavy environment meets strict financial compliance standards (PCI-DSS, SOC2).
• Influence & Mentor: Act as a force multiplier for the engineering organization by mentoring senior engineers, leading architecture review boards, and guiding major technical decisions.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• Proven Fintech Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant track record architecting large-scale payment platforms, ledger systems, or high-volume financial infrastructure.
• Distributed Systems Expert: Deep expertise in microservices architecture, event-driven design, and the trade-offs inherent in building consistent, high-throughput distributed systems.
• Cloud-Native Proficiency: Extensive experience designing and operating complex, high-traffic applications on AWS.
• Data & Transaction Integrity: Strong understanding of database patterns for financial data, including transaction atomicity, consistency models, and handling distributed data across microservices.
• Strategic Influencer: Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams, manage stakeholder expectations, and drive consensus on complex architectural trade-offs.
• Security & Compliance Awareness: Knowledge of designing for security within a regulated industry, understanding how to protect sensitive financial data while maintaining system throughput.
• Growth Mindset: Ability to balance immediate delivery needs with long-term architectural debt management.