Director of Technology & Chief Architect

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director of Technology & Chief Architect based in United States. This is a hands-on technology leadership role focused on shaping the architecture of a mature, high-volume cloud platform built around hundreds of Java microservices. You’ll take ownership of a production environment processing millions of real-time transactions each day, where performance, reliability, consistency, security, and auditability are critical. The role combines deep systems architecture with engineering leadership, allowing you to design systems, review code and schemas, establish technical standards, and guide long-term platform evolution. You’ll progressively take ownership across data, transaction processing, service architecture, and cloud infrastructure. Beyond technical execution, you’ll translate business priorities into a clear technology roadmap and communicate complex trade-offs to executives and stakeholders. This opportunity is suited to an experienced architect who wants meaningful ownership of a large-scale platform and its technical direction. Accountabilities: - Own the architecture of a large-scale microservices platform, progressively taking responsibility for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and inter-service communication. - Design high-volume, low-latency transaction systems with strong consistency, idempotency, resilience, and auditability requirements. - Define architectural patterns for distributed transactions, including sagas, outbox patterns, event sourcing where appropriate, retries, and failure recovery. - Lead architecture reviews, maintain architecture decision records, and establish consistent engineering standards across a large services ecosystem. - Identify architectural debt and develop modernization strategies for legacy services without disrupting live production traffic.

- Establish Java engineering standards covering frameworks, libraries, build tooling, coding practices, JVM performance, and garbage collection. - Own database and data-platform strategy across relational, NoSQL, caching, and streaming technologies, including schema design, partitioning, replication, and capacity planning. - Guide cloud architecture across containers, Kubernetes, managed data services, networking, and infrastructure as code. - Establish SLOs, observability standards, incident response practices, and approaches to scalability, resilience, disaster recovery, and cloud cost efficiency. - Ensure security, data protection, and auditability align with applicable regulatory and payment-related requirements. - Build, lead, mentor, and grow engineering and technology teams while raising standards for technical hiring and development. - Translate business objectives into technology roadmaps and project plans, manage technical vendors and third-party platforms, and evaluate technologies that can improve the platform. - Communicate technology strategy, architectural risks, trade-offs, and priorities clearly to executives, business partners, and technical teams. Requirements: - 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years as an architect of large-scale distributed systems. - Expert-level Java experience, including Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, concurrency, JVM performance tuning, and garbage collection. - Proven experience designing and operating production environments with 100+ microservices. - Experience building or operating systems processing millions of real-time transactions per day against defined latency and availability targets. - Deep database expertise with relational platforms such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle, including query tuning, indexing, sharding, and replication, combined with experience in NoSQL and caching technologies such as Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Redis.