Architect

We're looking for an architect to own the target-state architecture of our web platform and steer six engineering teams toward it.You'll have the final say on technical direction and work directly with team leads and engineers to put it into practice — aligning people through influence and clarity rather than authority.Most of your impact is upstream: translating business strategy into a coherent technical strategy, framing problems, and reducing risk while direction is still easy to change.You'll architect for sustained growth — horizontal scalability and the cross-cutting qualities (performance, reliability, maintainability, and the rest) that determine whether a platform keeps improving or stalls as users, data, and teams grow.We build a data-intensive B2B SaaS platform on Java 21, Spring, and AWS. Requirements: 10+ years building production software, several of them in a dedicated architecture capacity, primarily on Java / Spring. Demonstrated ownership of platform-level architecture spanning multiple teams. Deep distributed-systems expertise — microservices, event-driven and event-sourced designs. A proven record of scaling systems through real growth in traffic, data volume, and contributing teams. Command of data, caching, and search architecture (PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch) and of cloud-native operations — Kubernetes / EKS, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), and CI/CD — with the ability to design infrastructure as a reusable, governed platform. Strong grounding in observability practices — instrumentation, distributed tracing, and defining SLOs/SLIs for production systems. Advanced security expertise — secure-by-design architecture, authentication and authorization, and data protection across the stack. Fluency moving from deep technical discussion with engineers to strategic trade-off framing with executives. The self-direction to be the senior-most architectural voice, aligning teams through influence and clarity. Nice to have: High-traffic, data-intensive web experience at scale. AWS certification (Solutions Architect – Professional). Experience introducing AI-assisted, agentic development practices across the engineering lifecycle. Experience driving an organization through ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance programs. Responsibilities: Define and own the north-star architecture, the guiding principles, and the guardrails that keep six teams coherent without becoming a bottleneck. Establish lightweight architectural governance — reference architectures, Architecture Decision Records, an RFC process, and a tech radar — so decisions are deliberate, documented, and durable. Drive domain decomposition and service boundaries (DDD, bounded contexts), and design event-driven systems with sound consistency, idempotency, and resilience semantics. Set the observability strategy — metrics, logging, tracing, SLOs, and alerting standards — so teams can understand system behavior, debug quickly, and operate confidently at scale. Shape initiatives upstream: frame the problem, weigh build-vs-buy against total cost of ownership, and set a defensible long-term direction before engineering commits. Treat security as a first-class architectural concern: secure-by-design, zero-trust principles, threat modeling, and data protection across the stack. Set the infrastructure architecture and Infrastructure-as-Code standards (e.g. Terraform). Build proofs of concept to validate direction and prove out emerging technology before it becomes a commitment. Mentor senior engineers and raise the architectural maturity of every team. Hiring process: ✅ Interview with Talent Acquisition Specialist (45 min) - ✅ Interview with Engineering Manager - ✅ Interview with CTO - ✅ Reference check - ✅ Offer