Architect Distributed Software Platforms

Position: Architect – High-Performance Distributed Software Platforms
Location:

La Lucia, Durban, South Africa
Working Model:
On-site, five days per week Salary: R110,000 to R205,000 per month plus benefits, dependent on experience

Relocation Assistance:
Equivalent to one month’s basic salary
This Is a Hands-On Software Architecture Role
We are seeking an experienced Software or Solution Architect who has personally designed and delivered complex, distributed software systems across multiple products, services and engineering teams.

This is not primarily a people-management, programme-management or high-level enterprise-governance role. You will be expected to remain technically close to delivery: analysing existing systems, making and defending architecture decisions, producing clear design artefacts, reviewing APIs and technical designs, prototyping solutions, troubleshooting production issues and guiding teams through implementation.

You should be able to explain not only what architecture you designed, but also:
Which decisions you personally owned
Why you selected a particular approach
What trade-offs you considered
How the system handled failure, scale and operational risk
How your design performed in production
What you learned from the outcome
What You Will Do
Design end-to-end software architectures for complex initiatives spanning multiple systems, products and engineering teams.
Analyse business requirements, existing systems, constraints, dependencies and technical risks before design begins.
Define clear system boundaries, integration approaches, API contracts, data flows and team responsibilities.
Produce Architectural Decision Records, solution designs, integration diagrams, sequence diagrams and delivery strategies.
Evaluate trade-offs across scalability, performance, consistency, resilience, compliance, security, cost and maintainability.
Provide practical architecture consultation through design, API, code and technical-documentation reviews.
Coordinate technical inception across several teams before implementation handover.
Build proofs of concept to validate technologies, patterns and design assumptions.
Remain sufficiently hands-on to understand implementation realities and support complex technical problem-solving.
Contribute to root-cause analysis following production incidents and design improvements that prevent recurrence.
Mentor engineers in software design, distributed-systems thinking and technical decision-making.
Balance innovation with operational pragmatism, ensuring that solutions can be supported and evolved over time.
Essential Experience
Eight to ten years of progressive software engineering or software architecture experience.
At least three years of direct Solution or Software Architecture ownership.
Evidence of personally designing and delivering complex, distributed, multi-system solutions.
Strong experience with cloud-native application architecture and containerised environments.
Practical knowledge of Kubernetes, CI/CD, Dev Ops and the full SDLC.
Strong API, integration and event-driven architecture experience.
An understanding of data consistency, idempotency, message ordering, failure handling and distributed-system trade-offs.
Experience designing for scalability, resilience, disaster recovery, observability and operational support.
Experience conducting design reviews and providing actionable technical guidance to engineers.
Strong production troubleshooting and root-cause analysis capability.
The ability to explain complex architecture decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering or a related technical discipline.
Particularly Relevant Experience
Experience in any of the following would be valuable:
High-volume transactional platforms
Regulated technology environments
iGaming, fintech, payments or financial systems
Kafka or other event-streaming technologies
Real-time processing
Microservices
Data-intensive platforms
Platform modernisation
Machine learning or AI-enabled systems
Multi-team architecture governance

The Person We Are Looking For
You will enjoy this role if you:
Are energised by difficult technical problems
Ask thoughtful questions before…