Engineering Lead / Architect

Engineering Lead / Architect

Location: New York Position: Full time

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead / Architect who can own the technical direction of a complex platform modernization while staying hands-on enough to validate that direction through real delivery. This role sits at the intersection of architecture, engineering leadership, and execution—setting the runway for how we build, integrate, and evolve our systems.

You’ll define integration strategy, establish non-functional requirements, maintain the architecture decision log (ADRs), and ensure the team builds on patterns that hold up at scale. You’ll also be the technical conscience of the program—helping the team make pragmatic tradeoffs without accumulating hidden debt.

This role begins as a consulting engagement with a right-to-hire path.

What You’ll Do

• Own the architecture runway: define integration patterns, NFRs, security posture, and technical standards that the team builds against.
• Drive design reviews and ensure architectural consistency across backend services, APIs, frontend components, and data flows.
• Partner with Product, DevOps, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into architecture that balances correctness, operability, and delivery speed.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy and integration decisions with clear frameworks—especially around AKS, API gateway patterns, event-driven architecture, and workflow orchestration.
• Establish security and audit patterns: authentication, authorization, API contracts, data classification, and audit trail design.
• Hands-on contribution where it matters most: proof-of-concepts, critical-path components, and reference implementations that set the quality bar.
• Mentor engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and architecture pairing—raising the team’s ability to make good technical decisions independently.
• Use AI tools to accelerate architecture work (analysis, documentation, pattern evaluation), while maintaining strong judgment and validation.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful time in architecture or technical leadership roles.
• Deep experience with Java platform architecture (Spring Boot, Spring Security, modern Java) and API design (REST, contract-first, versioning).
• Strong understanding of security and audit patterns: OAuth/OIDC, RBAC, API gateway design, data classification, and compliance-aware architecture.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms, preferably AKS/Kubernetes, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and deployment pipelines.
• Proven ability to define and enforce integration patterns across distributed teams—you can set standards without becoming a bottleneck.
• Excellent written communication: your ADRs, design documents, and technical proposals are clear, concise, and decision-ready.
• A pragmatic mindset: you prefer proven patterns over novel ones, and you optimize for clarity and maintainability over cleverness.

Nice to Have

• Experience with event-driven architecture and messaging systems (Azure Event Hubs, Kafka, or similar).
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms (Temporal or similar) and their architectural implications.
• Experience modernizing legacy platforms while maintaining business continuity—especially migrations from monolithic or component-based systems.
• Exposure to design reviews and architecture governance in regulated or control-oriented domains (financial services, operations, accounting).