Principal Architect — Distributed Systems & Event Streaming (Director I - Product Architect)

b Overview /b p In this senior hands-on role, you will shape the event-driven platform architecture for UST FinX, guiding distributed systems and real-time processing. You’ll own the evolution of our event platform, ensuring scalability, resilience, and production readiness. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to translate business needs into robust technical solutions. This position offers impact at scale in the financial services domain, with a strong focus on observable, secure systems. Join a leadership-track role that blends architecture with practical code and delivery. /p b Responsibilities /b ul li Define and evolve the event-driven architecture strategy for the fintech platform /li li Lead architecture across distributed systems, event streaming, integration, orchestration, and real-time services /li li Build reusable frameworks, libraries, and reference implementations for producers, consumers, retries, replay, resilience, and observability /li li Establish standards for event contracts, schema evolution, governance, and lifecycle management /li li Guide Kafka/Redpanda architecture (topic design, partitions, throughput, ordering, failure handling) /li li Apply event sourcing, CQRS, asynchronous communication, and eventual consistency where valuable /li li Remain hands-on with Java, distributed systems, messaging, and platform engineering /li li Troubleshoot production issues related to latency, ordering, lag, and serialization /li li Mentor engineers through reviews, design discussions, and incident analysis /li li Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure secure, scalable, observable, production-ready systems /li li Report to CTO and influence multiple product and platform teams /li li Ensure architectural decisions are reflected in code and operational outcomes /li /ul b Key requirements /b ul li 10+ years of software engineering or architecture experience (12-18 years preferred) /li li Proven ownership of large-scale, production distributed systems /li li Deep hands-on expertise with Kafka, Redpanda, or similar event streaming platforms /li li Strong experience designing and operating event-driven architectures in enterprise environments /li li Expert-level Java engineering skills /li li Solid understanding of distributed systems design, consistency, ordering, concurrency, throughput, and latency optimization /li li Experience building resilient systems with retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, replay, and observability patterns /li li Strong debugging skills across code, messaging, infrastructure, and production operations /li li Excellent communication and mentoring ability across globally distributed teams /li /ul ul li excellent communication /li li mentoring capability /li li problem-solving /li li Kafka/Redpanda /li li Java /li li distributed systems /li /ul