What you'll be doing

Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, defining service boundaries, data models, and integration patterns to enable large-scale growth
Design for resilience using principles such as redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency, and recovery to prevent customer-facing outages
Set and defend critical non-functional requirements, including availability targets, latency percentiles, throughput ceilings, data durability, and recovery objectives
Lead complex technical decisions end to end: from problem framing and design review to production rollout, migration, and decommissioning
Drive operational excellence through enhanced observability, alerting, capacity planning, load and chaos testing, and incident response
Raise engineering standards across teams via design reviews, code reviews, pairing, mentorship, and growing senior engineers
Collaborate with product, platform, and engineering teams to prioritize delivery, remove blockers, and align multi-team programs
Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and refactor-versus-rewrite decisions, communicating trade-offs clearly to engineering and leadership

Requirements

Extensive experience building and operating distributed backend systems in production with proven technical leadership across multiple teams
Strong background designing for high throughput and low latency with keen intuition for system failure under load
Deep understanding of distributed system resilience patterns, including idempotency, retries with backoff, circuit breaking, queueing, backpressure, consistency, and failure modes
Proficiency in .NET or Java with the ability to write maintainable, production-ready code
Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures, and both relational and non-relational data stores at scale
Hands-on cloud application development experience with AWS and Azure, containers, orchestration, and infrastructure as code
Experience owning production systems on call, with strong ownership over observability, monitoring, and incident response
Led complex migrations or re-architectures of live, business-critical systems with no loss of availability or data integrity
Excellent communication skills able to influence without authority, write clear design documents, and convey technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences

Experience in payments, financial services, or domains requiring strict correctness, auditability, or regulatory compliance
Experience with multi-region or active-active architectures, including data replication and failover strategies
Track record of mentoring engineers into senior and staff-level roles