Systems Architect

What you'll do

• Define the technical direction and trade-offs for payment-critical distributed systems architecture.
• Establish reliability engineering practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning.
• Develop observability strategies involving distributed tracing, latency metrics, and alerting for large-scale operations.
• Review system designs to identify and mitigate scalability bottlenecks and resilience gaps.
• Write code and prototypes to validate architectural decisions and resolve production issues.
• Lead incident reviews and postmortems to implement systemic fixes rather than one-off patches.
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals like consensus, replication, and idempotency.
• Ensure architecture accounts for real-world constraints like multi-region failover and deployment requirements.

What we're looking for

• Proven track record 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 components 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 or reliability programs to drive durable systemic improvements.
• Ability to operate with ambiguity in complex landscapes and drive alignment among various stakeholders.
• Experience in payments, fraud systems, or multi-region distributed systems (preferred).