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

UST FinX is seeking a Principal Architect to lead the technical direction of event-driven architecture and distributed systems across our platform.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering leadership role where influence comes from building resilient systems, writing production-grade code, creating reusable frameworks, solving complex technical challenges, and raising engineering standards across the organisation.

You will own the architecture and evolution of our event platform, including Kafka/Redpanda, event contracts, schema management, event sourcing, CQRS, distributed consistency, high-throughput processing, resilience, observability, and operational excellence.

This is not an advisory or documentation-focused architecture role. We are looking for a practitioner who stays close to implementation and is passionate about building scalable, reliable systems in production.

What You'll Do

• Define and evolve the event-driven architecture strategy for UST FinX.
• Lead architecture across distributed systems, event streaming, integration, orchestration, and real-time processing services.
• Build reusable frameworks, libraries, and reference implementations for producers, consumers, retries, replay, resilience, and observability.
• Establish standards for event contracts, schema evolution, compatibility, governance, and lifecycle management.
• Guide teams on Kafka/Redpanda architecture, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, throughput, replay, ordering, and failure handling.
• Apply event sourcing, CQRS, asynchronous communication, and eventual consistency where they provide business value.
• Remain hands-on with Java, distributed systems, messaging infrastructure, and platform engineering.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues involving latency, ordering, consumer lag, duplication, retries, serialization, and distributed state.
• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, code reviews, and incident analysis.
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Platform, Data, DevOps, QA, and Delivery teams to ensure systems are secure, scalable, observable, and production-ready.

Reporting directly to the CTO, you will act as one of UST FinX's most senior technical leaders and a trusted force multiplier across engineering teams.

You will influence multiple product and platform pods, establish reusable engineering standards, challenge weak designs, and ensure architectural decisions are reflected in real systems, code, and operational outcomes.

Your authority will come from technical depth, engineering judgement, and execution rather than organisational hierarchy.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, or architecture (12-18 years preferred).
• Proven ownership of large-scale, production distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Kafka, Redpanda, or comparable event-streaming platforms.
• Strong experience designing and operating event-driven architectures in enterprise environments.
• Expert-level Java engineering skills.
• Deep understanding of:
  • Distributed systems design
  • Consistency models
  • Ordering and idempotency
  • Concurrency and backpressure
  • Throughput and latency optimisation
  • Replication, partitioning, and failure recovery
• Experience building resilient systems using retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, dead-letter queues, replay, rate limiting, and graceful degradation patterns.
• Strong debugging skills across code, messaging, infrastructure, observability, and production operations.
• Excellent communication and mentoring capability across globally distributed teams.

Preferred

• Redpanda architecture and operations.
• Event sourcing and CQRS in production environments.
• Stream processing with Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark Streaming, ksqlDB, or similar technologies.
• Financial services, banking, lending, payments, or regulated industry experience.
• Kubernetes and cloud-native platforms.
• Observability stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing.
• CI/CD, contract testing, performance testing, chaos engineering, and production-readiness practices.
• Event governance, auditability, data lineage, and security for event-driven platforms.

Why UST FinX?

This is a rare opportunity to shape the architecture of a modern financial technology platform while working directly with executive technology leadership.

You'll tackle some of the industry's most challenging distributed systems problems, helping build the engineering foundations that power the next generation of banking and financial services solutions.