System Architect

About the Role
We're looking for an exceptional System Architect to lead the design and evolution of our platform architecture. This is a hands-on role requiring deep technical expertise in building secure, scalable, and cost-efficient systems. You'll be responsible for critical architectural decisions affecting system performance, security, reliability, and modularity across our entire platform.

What You'll Do

Architecture & Design

• Design microservices and platform features from concept to production-ready specifications.
• Create technical designs for complex system components and develop proof-of-concepts in Golang.
• Architect secure, fault-tolerant systems with automated failover, circuit breakers, and end-to-end encryption.
• Analyze existing system architecture to understand current implementations and plan gradual replacement of legacy components. Plan implementation phases, migration strategies, and feature deprecation timelines.

Architectural Governance & Collaboration

• Review and approve architectural designs from engineering teams with detailed feedback.
• Lead architecture review sessions and facilitate technical decision-making across teams.
• Partner with Product Managers, Dev Leads, Security, SRE, and Infrastructure teams to establish platform-wide standards.
• Lead threat modeling exercises and drive technical consensus for platform-wide initiatives.
• Mentor engineers on architectural best practices and resolve complex technical challenges.

Documentation & Planning

• Write comprehensive technical documentation including ADRs, design documents, runbooks, and API specifications.
• Create visual system diagrams and research technical solutions from diverse sources.
• Design zero-downtime migration strategies and define acceptance criteria for architectural changes.

Qualifications / Experience / Technical Skills

• 8+ years building scalable distributed systems, with 3+ years in System/Platform Architect roles.
• Proven experience architecting both large microservice environments (100+ services) and monolithic applications.
• Strong hands-on Golang coding skills — must write production-quality code.
• Communication & Data: Protocol Buffers, gRPC, WebSockets, Kafka event streaming, PostgreSQL (partitioning, replication, HA).
• Security & Authentication: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, data encryption, public key cryptography, zero-trust architecture.
• Infrastructure & Operations: Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), distributed systems patterns (Saga, circuit breakers, retries).
• Scale: experience with systems handling millions of requests/events per day.
• Exceptional technical writing and communication abilities for diverse audiences.
• Experience planning phased implementations and leading complex cross-team projects.
• Proven track record with feature flags, gradual rollouts, and zero-downtime deployments.
• Ability to facilitate architectural decision-making and create technical roadmaps.
• Mentorship mindset and cost analysis capabilities.
• Experience with AI-assisted workflows, particularly in system analysis and hunting for inconsistencies and corner cases.

Nice to Have

• Additional languages: Ruby, Rust, Python, Java, C++, Kotlin-multiplatform.
• Advanced security: Key Management Systems (HSM, AWS KMS), Secrets Management (Vault), specific crypto algorithms.
• Extended infrastructure: service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), NoSQL databases, Redis clustering, stream processing (Flink, Spark).
• Cloud & compliance: AWS/GCP/Azure expertise, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC2.
• Community: open source contributions, conference speaking, technical writing.