Job Description: Solution Architect
Location: NYC, US
Job Type: Full-Time, Contract
About the Company
We are a global payments and commerce technology platform powering digital checkout, tokenization, biometric authentication, and high-throughput transaction systems at massive scale. Our mission is to enable secure, seamless, and frictionless digital commerce worldwide.
About the Role
We are seeking a Solution Architect who is both a strategic thinker and a hands-on practitioner in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and large-scale payment platforms. In this role, you will partner closely with product, engineering, and architecture teams to define reference architectures, drive standards, and deliver resilient, scalable, performant, and secure platforms.
You will combine deep technical expertise with the ability to influence, lead, and translate business goals into clear architectural direction. You will work directly with principal architects, engineering managers, and product leaders to shape how our global platform achieves low latency, high throughput, and fault-tolerant performance.
Key Responsibilities
* Architect end-to-end payment and platform solutions across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-native environments, meeting requirements for high throughput, low latency, resilience, security, and data privacy.
* Define, document, and promote architecture principles, patterns, and reference models (microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, async/sync messaging, DDD).
* Create clear, actionable architecture artifacts using C4, UML, sequence diagrams, deployment diagrams, and other modern modelling techniques.
* Evaluate and communicate design trade-offs (latency vs throughput, consistency vs availability, cost vs performance, security vs usability).
* Be hands-on with Java/Spring Boot microservices, event flows, messaging systems, integration patterns, observability, and failure-recovery strategies.
* Translate product roadmap items (e.g., tokenization, passkeys, BNPL) into technical architecture designs with clear trade-off analysis.
* Provide architectural governance: conduct design reviews, risk assessments, and lead architecture working groups or Centers of Excellence.
* Collaborate with cloud, infrastructure, security, DevOps, and data teams to ensure architecture meets NFRs and is production-ready.
* Explore emerging technologies—data streaming, event frameworks, open-source tools, AI/ML integration—and propose pragmatic adoption paths.
* Foster a strong architecture culture through best practices, knowledge-sharing, and mentoring across engineering teams.
Required Skills & Experience
* 15+ years in software engineering and architecture roles, with substantial hands-on coding and system design experience.
* Deep expertise with Java, Spring Boot, microservices, and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Axon, etc.).
* Strong background in distributed system design: low latency, high throughput, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, and resilience patterns.
* Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and hybrid cloud/on-prem integrations.
* Skilled in modern architecture documentation (C4, UML, sequence & deployment diagrams).
* Strong knowledge of integration patterns, messaging, orchestration, observability (logs/metrics/traces), caching, SQL & NoSQL databases.
* Demonstrated ability to explain and justify architectural decisions and influence engineering and product leadership.
* Excellent communication and simplification skills, able to clarify complex concepts for diverse audiences.
* Experience in payments, fintech, commerce, or similar high-scale, regulated environments is highly valuable.
* Proven leadership in defining standards, improving architecture maturity, and mentoring engineering teams.
Preferred Qualifications
* Certifications: TOGAF, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, CISSP, or similar.
* Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation).
* Exposure to AI/ML technologies, real-time analytics, and streaming platforms.
* Experience in payment/commerce environments with exposure to tokenization, passkeys, BNPL, or related capabilities.
