Technical Architect

Technical Architect
Company: "Client Company name"
Role type: Full-time
Domain: Distributed Systems, Cloud and Financial Services Technology
Experience: 11+ years overall, including 3+ years in a technical leadership or principal engineering role
About the Role
We are looking for a hands-on, language-agnostic Senior Technical Lead who will be a core engineering pillar of our team. You will design high-throughput, event-driven distributed systems and work closely with our dedicated Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps teams.
This is not a people-management-only or high-level advisory position. You are a practitioner who writes clean, testable code, diagnoses obscure production issues, and mentors developers to maintain the highest standards of software craftsmanship.
Our DevOps and Cloud Platform teams own provisioning and deployment pipelines. You will be the key technical bridge between application and infrastructure, with the systems-level knowledge to review, collaborate on and align application architecture with modern infrastructure practices.
Key Responsibilities
1. Distributed Systems and Event-Driven Design
Resilient architecture: Design and build scalable, secure and loosely coupled microservices using event-driven approaches.
Transactional reliability: Implement consistency and reliability patterns including SAGAs (orchestration and choreography), Inbox/Outbox for dependable message delivery, and idempotent consumers to protect data integrity.
Caching and performance: Design distributed caching strategies (read-through, write-behind, cache-aside) to reduce latency and database load.
Messaging platforms: Work with platform teams to choose and configure the right message brokers and event streaming technologies (for example Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS) for different use cases.
2. DevOps and Infrastructure Collaboration
Architectural alignment: Partner with DevOps and Platform Engineering teams so that application architecture fits GitOps practices and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards.
Review and input: Review infrastructure configurations such as Terraform modules and Helm charts, and confirm that deployment needs (CPU, memory, networking, environment variables) are correctly defined.
Kubernetes awareness: Apply a working understanding of containerized deployments on Kubernetes, and help optimize pod lifecycles, configuration management, and ingress and routing setup.
3. Cloud Engineering and Cost Optimization
Service selection: Work with Cloud Architecture teams to select and configure managed services, including relational and NoSQL databases (for example AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB), caching clusters (Redis, Memcached) and serverless runtimes (AWS Lambda, Fargate).
Cost-conscious design: Promote cloud cost awareness within the development team. With FinOps and infrastructure specialists, find savings by tuning database queries, designing efficient data serialization, tiering storage (hot, warm, cold), and building network-efficient architectures that limit egress and cross-AZ charges.
4. Engineering Standards and Quality
Software craftsmanship: Uphold SOLID, KISS, DRY and YAGNI principles across the codebase.
Quality assurance: Establish Test-Driven Development (TDD) as a team standard, and build comprehensive automated test suites covering unit, integration, contract and end-to-end (E2E) testing.
Technical mentorship: Raise the team's capability through high-quality code reviews, AI-assisted developer templates (for example automated test generation and safe analysis of legacy systems), and technical workshops.
5. Production Observability and Troubleshooting
Instrumentation: Design and configure telemetry using OpenTelemetry (OTEL) for distributed tracing, structured logging and metrics.
Complex diagnostics: Lead the investigation and resolution of difficult production issues, such as native or off-heap memory leaks, connection pool exhaustion, TCP and firewall packet drops, and thread starvation, in coordination with SRE teams.
Audit and security: Build tamper-evident, high-fidelity audit trails and centralized log aggregation to meet enterprise security and regulatory requirements.
Incident management: Lead technical incident triage and root-cause analysis, write clear blameless post-mortems, and design automated nightly data reconciliation jobs that detect and correct edge-case inconsistencies.
Required Skills and Experience
Experience: 11+ years of hands-on software development, including at least 3 years in technical leadership or principal engineering. You still write, review and debug production code yourself.
Programming: Strong hands-on experience in Java or .NET (C#), including building .NET services. Working familiarity with the other is a plus. You choose the right tool for the job.
DevOps and cloud: Strong familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes concepts and Helm. You can read and review infrastructure code and collaborate comfortably with DevOps engineers.
Distributed systems: Hands-on experience building microservices and applying SAGA patterns, Transactional Inbox/Outbox, distributed locks, cache invalidation strategies and event stream processing.
Cloud and cost awareness: Experience selecting and tuning managed cloud services, with a clear understanding of cost drivers such as database scaling, caching, network egress and storage lifecycles.
Observability and diagnostics: Deep knowledge of OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger or APM tools (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic). Proficiency with in-container troubleshooting tools such as jcmd, pmap, strace and tcpdump.
Quality and testing: Strong commitment to TDD and testing frameworks, and the ability to write maintainable, easily testable code.
AI-assisted development: Experience using AI tools (LLMs, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to speed up work such as generating baseline tests, refactoring complex code and writing developer documentation, while critically evaluating all output.
AI agents: Practical experience designing and building AI agents, including agent frameworks, tool calling, orchestration and guardrails, and integrating them into microservice-based systems.
Preferred Qualifications
Domain experience: Background in financial services such as payments, cross-border remittance, FX engines, clearing/ACH, card issuing, or KYC/AML compliance systems.
Certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, or an equivalent cloud-native certification.
Architecture styles: Familiarity with Clean Architecture, Hexagonal (Ports and Adapters) Architecture and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
What We Expect of You
Technical Architect Lead, you bring the architectural depth, systems-level curiosity and technical rigor to review, stress-test and understand the code entering our repositories. You build for durability, test defensively, and take full ownership of production quality.