Role Overview
We are seeking a highly accomplished and hands-on Chief Architect to lead the architecture vision and technology strategy for Kissht. This role will drive system design, scalability, reliability, resilience, and innovation across all engineering initiatives influencing 150+ engineers across multiple squads and serving as the CTO's technical right hand.
Key Responsibilities:
Technology & Architecture Leadership
- Define and own the enterprise architecture strategy aligned with business growth plans.
- Design scalable, high-availability, and secure distributed systems with clearly defined SLAs/SLOs and p95/p99 latency targets.
- Lead architecture for core lending systems (LOS, LMS, underwriting engines, fraud systems, payment integrations).
- Establish best practices in system design, microservices architecture, API-first design, event-driven systems, and data engineering.
- Drive modernization initiatives, technical debt reduction, and domain-driven design adoption.
- Champion resilience patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, retry policies, graceful degradation) and chaos engineering practices.
Engineering Excellence
- Work closely with Engineering Managers to ensure robust implementation across squads.
- Conduct architecture reviews, ADR (Architecture Decision Records) governance, and code quality oversight.
- Define DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi), and cloud infrastructure best practices.
- Improve system performance, observability (distributed tracing, metrics, logging), and platform reliability.
- Establish rollback strategies, blue-green/canary deployment patterns, and progressive delivery standards.
Cloud, AI & Data Strategy
- Lead AI/ML model infrastructure and integration strategy for lending workflows.
- Own cloud architecture (AWS and GCP preferred); drive multi-region, multi-AZ design for high availability.
- Drive data platform architecture including real-time analytics, streaming pipelines, and data warehouse strategy.
- Define database strategy across SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), including sharding, replication, and data partitioning for high-throughput lending systems.
- Ensure data security and compliance readiness.
FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimization
- Own cloud cost optimization strategy; establish FinOps practices including cost attribution, reserved/spot instance planning, and budget guardrails.
- Implement cost visibility dashboards and enforce cost-per-transaction accountability across engineering teams.
- Partner with Finance to forecast infrastructure spend aligned with business growth projections.
Regulatory & Security Compliance
- Ensure systems comply with RBI/NBFC regulations (if applicable).
- Establish strong information security and cybersecurity architecture (encryption at rest/in transit, secrets management, zero-trust principles).
- Oversee DR/BCP planning and implementation with defined RTO/RPO targets.
Strategic Partnership with CTO
- This role reports to the CTO and acts as the CTO's technical sounding board.
- Translate business priorities into technology roadmaps with clear milestones and trade-off documentation.
- Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and frameworks through structured PoC and RFC processes.
- Represent technology in cross-functional and board-level discussions when required.
Team Leadership & Mentorship
- Provide architectural mentorship and technical guidance across 150+ engineers spanning multiple squads.
- Build and nurture a high-performing architecture and platform team.
- Drive a culture of ownership, innovation and technical rigor.
- Conduct architecture guild sessions, tech talks, and internal knowledge-sharing programs.
Experience
- 12+ years of experience in engineering and system architecture.
- 5+ years in a senior architecture leadership role.
- Proven experience in scaling systems to millions of users/transactions in a high-growth environment.
Technical Expertise
Strong hands-on experience in:
- Microservices architecture and distributed systems at scale
- API-first design and API gateway strategies
- Event-driven architecture (Kafka, or similar streaming platforms)
- Cloud-native systems (containers, serverless, managed services)
Deep knowledge of:
- Database strategy across SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis); polyglot persistence, sharding, and replication
- Caching strategies (Redis, Memcached) and performance optimization
- Security architecture (OAuth 2.0, mTLS, secrets management, zero-trust)
- Resilience engineering (circuit breakers, bulkheads, chaos engineering)
Experience with:
- DevOps & CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar)
- Containerization & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi)
- Observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Jaeger/Zipkin, or similar)
- FinOps tooling and cloud cost governance
Leadership & Soft Skills
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and influence 150+ engineers across multiple teams.
- Strong stakeholder communication ability to translate technical trade-offs for business audiences.
- Experience driving architecture governance (ADRs, RFCs, tech radar).
- Track record of building high-performing platform/architecture teams.
