Description

• Own end-to-end architecture from requirements and constraints through HLD/LLD, implementation, release, monitoring and production improvement. • Independently sketch and defend a distributed-system design; articulate assumptions, bottlenecks, trade-offs, alternatives and design decisions. • Critically review architecture, identify security/scalability/consistency gaps and propose workable remediation with measurable impact. • Document decisions as ADRs and explain personal design contributions, rejected alternatives and outcomes. JAVA / BACKEND / PAYMENTS • Design and deliver secure, high-throughput REST APIs, microservices and event-driven integrations using Java/Spring Boot or comparable backend technologies. • Engineer reliable financial workflows using idempotency keys, transactional boundaries, retries, reconciliation, auditability and controlled recovery from partial failures. • Design appropriate data models, caching, message processing and fault-tolerant service interactions. SECURITY / AUTHORIZATION • Design and enforce fine-grained authorization at API, service and resource levels; distinguish authentication, token validation and authorization decisions. • Apply OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, RBAC/ABAC, least privilege, secure service identity and tenant isolation, including authorization of AI tools and retrieved documents. AI / GENERATIVE AI • Deliver production AI capabilities using LLM APIs, RAG, vector search and agents where appropriate; own evaluation, guardrails, access controls, monitoring and operational support. • Explain why an AI architecture was selected, its limitations, security risks, fallback behavior and measurable business results. CLOUD / DEVOPS / OPERATIONS • Deploy on AWS, Azure or GCP; use Docker/Kubernetes, automated CI/CD and infrastructure as code. • Define SLOs, investigate latency/throughput issues, use metrics/logs/traces and lead root-cause analysis and resilience improvements. • Communicate designs clearly in technical reviews and respond constructively to design challenges without depending on repeated interviewer prompts" MANDATORY — SYSTEM DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURAL OWNERSHIP • Independently design scalable, secure, highly available distributed systems from ambiguous requirements; produce HLD/LLD, API contracts, data models, sequence diagrams and ADRs. • Explain trade-offs between synchronous/asynchronous communication, database technologies, caching, consistency, throughput, latency and operational cost. • Identify flaws in a proposed design and propose practical corrections without extensive prompting; explain assumptions, alternatives and failure modes. • Demonstrated personal ownership of at least one complex production system, including implementation, rollout and incident response. MANDATORY — DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, SECURITY AND PRODUCTION ENGINEERING • Microservices, REST APIs, Kafka or equivalent messaging; idempotency, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, dead-letter queues, ordering, outbox/Saga patterns and transaction consistency. • Authentication versus authorization (AuthN/AuthZ), OAuth2/OIDC, JWT validation, RBAC/ABAC, resource-level permissions, least privilege, tenant isolation and service-to-service security. • Capacity planning, horizontal scaling, performance diagnosis, SLOs/SLIs, tracing, observability, failure recovery, safe deployment and rollback. • Financial transaction or payments workflow design (ACH, push payments, P2P, settlement, reconciliation) strongly preferred. MANDATORY — ENGINEERING AND AI • Strong backend programming and hands-on delivery (Java 17/21, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Hibernate/JPA preferred; equivalent backend languages/frameworks considered where architecture depth is proven). • Production AI/GenAI integration experience: LLM APIs, RAG, agent/tool orchestration, vector retrieval, evaluation, access control, prompt-injection safeguards and observability; ability to distinguish production delivery from prototypes. • SQL and NoSQL database design; cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP), Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD and automated testing. PREFERRED • Kotlin/Python, LangChain/LlamaIndex, MCP, multi-agent systems, GraphRAG, knowledge graphs, MLOps/LLMOps, NVIDIA NIM, Terraform, GKE, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB and Snowflake. "Senior technical leadership with demonstrable individual design ownership, not title-only architecture participation. • Structured, concise communication of system diagrams, assumptions, risks, trade-offs and remediation options. • Ability to reason independently under follow-up questions, acknowledge limitations and improve designs collaboratively. • Mentoring, peer design reviews, cross-team influence, production accountability and stakeholder engagement." KEYWORDS "Senior System Design, Software Architect, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, HLD, LLD, Architecture Decision Record, ADR, Distributed Systems, AuthZ, Authorization, RBAC, ABAC, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, Resource-Level Authorization, Multi-Tenant, Idempotency, Saga, Outbox Pattern, Event-Driven, Kafka, Payment Processing, ACH, Push Payments, Reconciliation, Resilience, Fault Tolerance, Scalability, Capacity Planning, SLO, Observability, Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, REST API, RAG, GenAI, AI Agents, LLM, Vector Database, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD

Key Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree