Principal Architect

As the senior-most Individual Contributor (IC), you will be the primary custodian of our end-to-end technical architecture. You will partner with the CTO to define the long-term technology roadmap that powers India's largest fashion e-commerce ecosystem. This is a role for a visionary builder who has seen systems fail at a billion requests and knows exactly how to prevent it the next time. You will not just "design" systems; you will evolve our culture of engineering excellence and act as the ultimate mentor to our community of architects.

Responsibilities:

• Architectural Stewardship: Own the global architecture blueprint. Ensure that our systems (Commerce, Supply Chain, Logistics, and Ads) are decoupled, resilient, and ready for 10x growth.
• Strategic Engineering: Drive "Zero-to-One" initiatives. Whether it's moving toward a headless commerce engine, integrating agentic AI into the shopping funnel, or optimising multi-cloud costs (FinOps), you lead the charge.
• System Integrity and Scale: Ensure the platform can sustain massive traffic bursts (e. g., EORS) with high availability ($99.99\%+$) and sub-100ms latencies across critical paths.
• Technical Governance: Set the "Gold Standards" for API design, data modelling, and security. Review and sign off on high-impact RFCs and Design Docs across the organisation.
• Architectural Mentorship: Act as the Primus inter pares (First among equals) for our architects. Build a world-class architecture guild, fostering a culture of rigorous peer reviews and continuous learning.
• Hands-on Prototyping: While you operate at a high level, you are expected to build "vanguard" prototypes or POCs for complex, cross-cutting technical problems.

Requirements:

• The Veteran's Lens: 20-25 years of experience in core consumer internet products. You have lived through multiple technology cycles and migrations.
• Scale Mastery: Proven track record of architecting and scaling distributed systems that handle billions of requests and petabytes of data.
• Tech Stack Breadth: Deep expertise in Java ecosystems, NoSQL/SQL (Cassandra, ScyllaDB, PostgreSQL), Streaming (Kafka, Flink), and Cloud-Native infra (GCP/Azure, K8S, Istio).
• Product Thinking: You don't build tech for tech's sake. You understand the "fashion" business: inventory turns, warehouse throughput, and customer LTV.
• Leadership without Authority: Exceptional ability to influence Engineering and Product Leadership through technical clarity, empathy, and data-backed conviction. Unlike many "Principal Architect" roles that end up being managerial, this is a pure-play technical leadership path. You will have the ear of the CTO and the freedom to shape the future of a platform that defines how millions of Indians shop.
• Required skills: cloud platform, system reliability, scalability and performance engineering, architecture.