Senior Software Architect

Function : Engineering - Architecture

Reports to : CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development

Direct reports : None - technical authority and mentorship across all engineering squads

Experience : 12+ years building software, including 5+ years as an architect or principal engineer

Working Shift : 11 : 30 AM to 8 : 30 PM

The role :

We are hiring a Senior Software Architect to own the technical design of the systems Delta6Labs builds across exchanges, wallets and custody, trading infrastructure, and the white-label core that underpins our client deployments. You will report to the CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development and work across every squad without owning any of them.

Education : B.E. / B.Tech / M.C.A. in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience considered.

What you will own :

System and platform architecture :

- Design end-to-end architectures for new platforms and major subsystems from context and constraints through service decomposition, data models, integration contracts and deployment topology.

- Design high-throughput, low-latency paths order matching, order-book and market-data distribution, risk checks, liquidity routing against explicit written latency and throughput budgets rather than hopeful assumptions.

- Design wallet and custody architecture : hot, warm and cold segregation, MPC and multi-signature schemes, key lifecycle and rotation, withdrawal approval and limit flows, and integration with providers such as Fireblocks.

- Own data architecture relational modelling, event schemas and their evolution, caching strategy, analytical and time-series stores, retention and data-residency requirements across jurisdictions.

- Define non-functional architecture explicitly : availability and latency targets, failure domains and blast radius, degradation behaviour, capacity headroom, and disaster-recovery design with real RPO and RTO figures.

Reuse, the white-label core and technical strategy :

- Own the architectural line between the reusable platform core and client-specific extension so customisation happens at configuration and extension points rather than by forking, and one client's requirement does not become everyone's regression.

- Design tenant isolation, configuration and feature-flag models that let us onboard a new client without re-architecting, and ship a fix to one without endangering the rest.

- Maintain reference architectures and reusable building blocks for our recurring product shapes - CEX, derivatives, wallet, launchpad so each engagement starts from proven ground rather than a blank page.

- Own the technology radar with the CTO : what we standardise on, what we pilot, what we deliberately retire, and the honest build-versus-buy calls on custody, market data, compliance and infrastructure.

- Produce the architectural roadmap for paying down structural debt, and sequence it so remediation lands alongside delivery rather than competing with it.

Security and compliance by design :

- Threat-model high-value flows authentication, withdrawals, key operations, privileged and admin access, third-party callbacks and design controls in from the start rather than bolting them on after an audit finds them.

- Own the architecture of authentication, authorisation and tenancy boundaries, secrets and key management, least privilege, and tamper-evident audit trails.

- Architect integration with compliance and analytics vendors - KYC/AML (SumSub, Veriff), blockchain analytics (Chainalysis), sanctions screening - including failure and fallback behaviour for when a vendor is down and onboarding cannot simply stop.

- Set the architectural standards and review criteria for smart-contract work, and act as our technical counterpart in external audits and penetration tests.

Client solutioning and pre-sales engineering :

- Translate client requirements - often expressed commercially or in regulatory language into architectures that are buildable, supportable and honestly estimated.

- Lead technical discovery and solution design for new engagements : constraints, integrations, jurisdictional requirements, non-functional targets, and the assumptions everything else rests on.

- Support pre-sales with architecture walkthroughs, feasibility assessments, effort and risk shaping, and RFP responses and say clearly when a request is technically unwise, before it becomes a commitment.

- Represent Delta6Labs credibly in front of client CTOs, security teams and auditors, and leave them more confident than when the meeting started.

Technical leadership without direct authority :

- Write the documents that carry decisions design docs, RFCs and architecture decision records that state the problem, the options, the trade-offs and the reasoning clearly enough that an engineer can build from them and a successor can understand them in two years.

- Run the architecture review practice : review significant designs before they are built and critical code after, and give feedback that improves the design rather than merely signalling seniority.

- Mentor senior engineers and tech leads toward architectural thinking, and grow the next generation of architects deliberately rather than by accident.

- Build consensus across squads, Product, QA and DevSecOps - in this role you will need to be persuasive far more often than you get to be decisive.

- Stay hands-on : prototype the risky part, benchmark the assumption, and debug the incident nobody else can. Architecture that is never validated in code is speculation.

What you must bring :

- 12+ years building production software, including 5+ years as an architect, principal engineer or equivalent senior technical authority.

- A portfolio of systems you personally designed that reached production and stayed there with the ability to explain the constraints, the trade-offs you chose, and what you would do differently now.

- Deep distributed-systems expertise : service decomposition, event-driven architecture, streaming and messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ or similar), consistency and consensus trade-offs, idempotency, and designing for partial failure as the normal case.

- Genuine hands-on depth in at least one of C++, Node.js/TypeScript or Python, databases with the fluency to read and reason across the others.

- Demonstrated architectural ownership of a high-throughput, low-latency or high-transaction-volume platform in fintech, payments, trading, exchange or a comparable domain.

- Strong data architecture skills : relational modelling and query performance at scale, caching, schema and event evolution, and choosing appropriately between relational, time-series, analytical and NoSQL stores.

- Deep API and integration design experience - REST, WebSocket, including versioning, contracts, rate limiting and authorisation models fit to hand to a third party.

- Strong cloud and infrastructure architecture competence : AWS or GCP, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and cost-aware design.

- Security architecture instincts appropriate to systems holding customer funds : threat modelling, authentication and authorisation, key and secret management, least privilege and auditability.

- Exceptional written communication. This role produces documents other people build from; if you cannot write a clear design doc, you cannot do this job.

- The judgement and composure to defend a technical position with senior engineers, and to explain risk plainly to executives, clients and auditors.

Nice to have :

- Direct experience architecting crypto exchange or digital-asset infrastructure : matching engines, order books, market data, liquidity aggregation, margin and derivatives, or settlement.

- Smart-contract architecture and audit experience, including upgradeability patterns and known failure modes.

- Experience with custody and key-management systems : MPC, multi-signature, HSMs, or providers such as Fireblocks.

- Financial-systems fundamentals : double-entry ledgers, reconciliation, fee engines, market-data normalisation and regulatory reporting.

- Prior architect experience in a product-and-services organisation with a multi-tenant or white-label delivery model and client-facing technical responsibility.

- Working knowledge of standards relevant to fintech and digital assets : OWASP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and AML/KYC obligations.

- Open-source contribution, published technical writing, or conference speaking in distributed systems, fintech or blockchain.