Principal, Solution Architecture (Chicago)

We are building a culture that empowers continued learning, authentic innovation, and constant creativity. We are looking for an individual to join our team as a Solution Architect with the following skills and abilities:

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

What You’ll Do

• Design the applications’ architecture across distributed and enterprise technology platforms while leveraging event‑driven architecture, publish/subscribe messaging, and microservices, and using infrastructure‑as‑code practices to enable consistent, repeatable, and automated provisioning across environments.
• Define and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Design streaming and batch‑based systems that support both real‑time and scheduled data flow across the organization.
• Shape and guide the architecture of message‑based systems utilizing Kafka or similar platforms to enable reliable, decoupled, event‑driven communication between services.
• Develop and oversee data architecture and integration strategies spanning streaming, batch, and message‑based processing to ensure reliable, secure, and efficient data flow across systems.
• Own end‑to‑end solution architecture from ideation through implementation, including documentation of architectural decisions and system diagrams.
• Guide the development and deployment of distributed, cloud‑native services, ensuring resilience, scalability, and cost‑efficiency.
• Collaborate with DevOps, platform engineering, and security teams to ensure architectures are operable, resilient, and aligned with organizational standards.
• Review designs and code from engineering teams to ensure alignment with architectural standards, security requirements, and regulatory/compliance needs.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex, cross‑system issues spanning application, infrastructure, messaging, and data layers.
• Partner with engineering, data, and business teams to translate business requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions.
• Translate complex architectural decisions and trade‑offs into clear, actionable insights for business stakeholders and non‑technical audiences to support informed decision‑making.
• Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and technologies, and provide recommendations for adoption.
• Mentor engineering teams on architectural best practices, distributed systems, event‑driven and batch processing design.
• Explain complex technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience in one or more of the following domains: event‑driven and message‑based systems, transaction processing systems, distributed and parallel computing.
• Solid experience designing application architectures across distributed and enterprise technology platforms, including microservices and streaming or batch‑based applications.
• Experience with projects involving complex integration of disparate types of technologies/platforms and data.
• Experience architecting large‑scale distributed systems.
• Architect Kubernetes‑based deployment topology for stateless services and on‑demand jobs, including horizontal pod autoscaling, multi‑AZ resilience, cross‑region/on‑prem failover, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Fluent in object‑oriented design, industry best practices, software patterns, and architecture principles.
• Experience defining and documenting architecture strategies, designs, and requirements across all enterprise architecture domains – business, information systems (applications & data), and technology.
• Experience defining non‑functional requirements (NFRs) including performance, scalability, availability, and security and ensuring applications’ architecture satisfies them.
• Highly motivated with a strong sense of ownership of their work/projects.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.

Technical Skills

• Software development experience in Java, Python, or C#, including building high‑throughput, low‑latency services for data‑intensive or transaction‑oriented systems.
• Strong knowledge of Kafka or other messaging/streaming systems, including topic design, partitioning strategies, and producer/consumer patterns for reliable, event‑driven communication.
• Fluent in object‑oriented design principles, software design patterns, and modern architecture practices (e.g., microservices, event‑driven architecture, domain‑driven design), applied to large‑scale systems.
• Knowledge of identity and access management using OAuth2/OIDC flows, JWT‑based token validation, and integration with identity providers.
• Knowledge of schema management and data serialization formats, preferably Protocol Buffers, including schema evolution.
• Understanding of data lake‑house architecture and table formats such as Apache Iceberg.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code principles and tooling, preferably Terraform.
• Working knowledge of DevOps tooling and practices such as Git, Jenkins, Docker, ArgoCD, and others to support automated build, test, and deployment of distributed, containerized applications.
• Experience working with Cloud ecosystems (AWS, PaaS, K8s).

Education and/or Experience

Minimum Qualifications

• BS degree in Computer Science, similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 6+ years of work experience in the capital markets industry.

Certificates or Licenses

• None.

Benefits

• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work.
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education.
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance.
• Technology Stipend to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely.
• Generous PTO and Parental leave.
• 401(k) Employer Match.
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision.

Compensation

The salary range listed for any given position is exclusive of fringe benefits and potential bonuses.

Salary Range

$175,100.00 - $282,800.00

Incentive Range

23% to 30%

OCC is an Equal Opportunity Employer.