Key Responsibilities :

Leadership & Strategy :

- Lead and mentor engineering teams across Platform, DevOps, Database, and Java backend.

- Define the long-term architecture vision, engineering roadmap, and team scalability plan.

- Build and reinforce a culture of ownership, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.

- Promote Agile development practices across teams to improve delivery velocity, collaboration, and product quality.

- Work closely with Product, Security, and Business stakeholders to deliver scalable and secure solutions.

Architecture & Technical Ownership :

- Own high-level and low-level system design for distributed microservices using Python (FastAPI) and Java (Spring Boot).

- Drive best practices for REST APIs, WebSockets, async models, and event-driven architecture.

- Ensure platform scalability, performance, resilience, observability, and high availability (HA/DR).

- Standardize architectural patterns across microservices, API contracts, and integration workflows.

Cloud, Infrastructure & DevOps :

- Lead AWS workload design and governance across compute, networking, storage, IAM, and monitoring.

- Govern Kubernetes deployments including orchestration, auto-scaling, cluster governance, and resiliency.

- Mature SRE and DevSecOps practices across CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure automation, and operational playbooks.

- Drive Cloud Cost Optimization through data-driven architecture and resource utilization strategies.

Data, Storage, Messaging & Integration :

- Develop strategy for supporting OLTP and OLAP workloads across relational and NoSQL databases.

- Oversee performance, HA/DR, and scaling across PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and analytical data platforms.

- Govern Kafka and RabbitMQ messaging frameworks for distributed and event-based workloads.

- Scale Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines for real-time data synchronization across services.

- Lead data pipelines and ETL/ELT flows with a focus on reliability, encryption, lineage, and compliance.

- Ensure Redis-based caching delivers consistent low-latency performance for critical workloads.

Security & Compliance :

- Champion secure SDLC, zero-trust engineering, and secure-by-design architecture.

- Enforce IAM governance, encryption, tokenization, secret management, and vulnerability remediation.

- Support fintech regulatory and audit frameworks such as PCI DSS, SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR, etc.

Execution & Delivery :

- Drive predictable execution using Agile development frameworks, sprint planning, and continuous delivery.

- Ensure milestone-based planning, risk management, and efficient dependency coordination.

- Track key engineering KPIs: performance SLAs, uptime, MTTR, deployment frequency, defect density, and cloud spend KPIs.

- Promote blameless postmortems and structured RCA programs to improve engineering maturity.

Client & Stakeholder Engagement :

- Represent Engineering on client calls, technical escalations, architecture reviews, and roadmap discussions.

- Provide clear articulation of trade-offs, timelines, technical risks, and delivery expectations.

- Translate business objectives into actionable technical plans and cross-team execution.

Required Qualifications :

- 12+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in leadership roles across cross-functional teams.

- Proven track record designing and scaling distributed microservices-based systems.

Deep technical expertise in :

- Python FastAPI & Java Spring Boot

- REST APIs and WebSocket-based real-time systems

- System design, async programming, event-driven architecture

- Kubernetes (EKS preferred) & AWS

- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and OLTP/OLAP database systems

- Kafka & RabbitMQ

- Redis

- CDC and high-throughput data pipelines

- Strong understanding of Agile development methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) and scaled agile delivery.

- Hands-on experience with DevSecOps, SRE, CI/CD, IaC (Terraform/Helm), monitoring, and observability.

- Proven ability to execute Cloud Cost Optimization at scale.

- Experience working in fintech or other regulated industries with sensitive data requirements.

- Outstanding communication and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications :

- Background in enterprise architecture.

- Experience supporting PCI DSS, ISO27001, SOC2, GDPR controls.

- Experience scaling high-growth SaaS or multi-tenant cloud platforms.

- Must be from Tier1 college or Product company (SaaS/Fintech) background.