Principal Solutions Architect

Principal Architect – Payment Platforms Location: NYC, US (New York & New Jersey candidates only) Job Type: Full‑Time, Contract About the Role We’re looking for a Principal Architect who is a true thought leader and practitioner in distributed systems, microservices, event‑driven architectures, and large‑scale payment platforms. You will partner across product, engineering, and architecture teams to define and document reference architectures, drive standards, and deliver resilient, performant, scalable, and secure systems. You’ll combine deep technical hands‑on experience with strategic vision, translating business goals into real architecture solutions and influencing across the organization. Key Responsibilities Architect end‑to‑end payment and platform systems (on‑premises, hybrid, cloud‑native) that meet demands of low latency, high throughput, resilience, security, and data privacy. Define and promote architecture principles, reference models, patterns (e.g., microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, async & sync messaging, domain‑driven design) and guide teams in adoption. Document architecture using modern modelling tools and techniques (C4, UML, deployment/sequence/data diagrams); ensure artifacts are clear, actionable, and accessible. Evaluate design trade‑offs (latency vs throughput vs cost; consistency vs availability; complexity vs maintainability; security vs usability) and make decisions transparently. Be highly hands‑on: dig into Java/Spring Boot microservices, event flows, integration architectures, observability, failure handling and recovery strategies. Collaborate closely with product leadership to translate roadmap items (tokenization, passkeys, BNPL) into architecture design, providing options, implications and trade‑off analysis. Lead architecture governance: review design proposals, perform risk assessments, drive architectural reviews, and lead a Center of Excellence for architecture practices. Engage across engineering domains: partner with cloud, infrastructure, security, DevOps, data teams to ensure architecture meets cross‑cutting non‑functional requirements. Drive innovation: explore new open‑source technologies, event frameworks, data streaming, AI/ML integration, real‑time analytics and bring pragmatic proposals into the platform roadmap. Influence culture: promote architecture best practices, drive continuous improvement, contribute to knowledge‑sharing forums, build an architecture community within the organization. Required Skills & Experience 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering and architecture roles, with extensive hands‑on coding and systems design. Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot microservices, event‑driven systems (Kafka, Axon, etc.), synchronous and asynchronous communications, domain‑driven design. Strong knowledge of distributed system design: high throughput, low latency, fail‑fast, resilient architectures, graceful degradation, fault isolation. Experience in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and hybrid cloud/on‑prem integrations. Skilled in architecture modelling and documentation using modern tools and frameworks (C4, UML, etc.). Excellent understanding of integration patterns, messaging, service orchestration, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), caching, databases (SQL & NoSQL). Proven ability to articulate design trade‑offs, influence senior stakeholders, and lead architecture decisions. Strong communication skills: ability to simplify complex architecture concepts, present to non‑technical audiences, and collaborate with engineering. Experience in payments, fintech, commerce platforms or similarly complex, regulated, high‑scale systems highly desirable. Proven track record of setting standards, leading architecture practice, mentoring teams, driving governance, and improving architectural maturity. Seniority Level Mid‑Senior Employment Type Part‑Time Job Function Information Technology – Banking #J-18808-Ljbffr