Systems Architect

What you'll do

• Guide the evolution of distributed systems by making technical trade-offs regarding consistency, availability, latency, and durability.
• Define and drive adoption of reliability engineering practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning.
• Establish the observability and metrics strategy for distributed tracing, alerting, and real-time transaction impact monitoring.
• Review cross-team designs to identify scalability bottlenecks, points of failure, and resilience gaps.
• Write code and prototypes to validate architectural decisions, unblock engineering teams, or resolve production issues.
• Lead technical reviews and postmortems for major incidents to drive systemic fixes rather than one-off patches.
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals such as consensus, replication, partitioning, and idempotency.
• Ensure architecture decisions account for real-world operational constraints like multi-region failover and capacity headroom.

What we're looking for

• Proven track record of designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency production environments.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals including replication, partitioning, consensus protocols, consistency models, and failure handling.
• Hands-on experience defining and instrumenting metrics for availability and scalability, such as SLOs, error budgets, and distributed tracing.
• Strong background in scalable system building blocks like load balancing, caching, message queues, database sharding, and rate limiting.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction across multiple teams and communicate trade-offs clearly to engineers and leadership.
• Track record of leading incident reviews and reliability programs to drive durable systemic improvements.
• Experience with multi-region or globally distributed systems, including failover and disaster recovery design at scale (preferred).
• Prior experience in payments, fraud/risk systems, or other regulated, high-availability financial infrastructure (preferred).