Senior Platform Architect, Infrastructure & Cloud Operations

Position Overview

The Instant Financial Issuance as a Service (IFIaaS) Cloud Service consists of various components, such as web services, application servers, and databases, all hosted in an on‑premises environment. We are seeking a Senior Platform Architect who is hands‑on and deeply involved in the design and evolution of a modern, on‑premises SaaS platform. The platform is built using distributed microservices, runs primarily on VMware‑hosted Windows workloads, and is transitioning toward containerized architectures.

This role focuses on designing and validating systems that meet strict requirements for availability (99.9%), scalability, performance, and security. In this role, you will work directly with engineering, infrastructure, and the Cloud Ops team to design platform architecture, define deployment patterns, and solve complex system‑level challenges. You will actively participate in architectural design sessions, review and influence implementation details, and help troubleshoot and remediate systemic issues in production environments.

The Senior Platform Architect is expected to deeply understand how the platform is built and operated, and to apply that knowledge to improve reliability, resilience, and long‑term maintainability of the system. This role is ideal for an architect who enjoys staying close to technology, contributing to real design decisions, and shaping how distributed systems are built and run in a modern on‑prem environment.

• Own the availability architecture across compute, network, storage, data, and app tiers to exceed 99.9% service availability.
• Design fault domains (host, rack, cluster, site) and enforce placement strategies to ensure resilience and predictable failure behavior and blast radius limits.
• Eliminate single points of failure across compute, storage, networking, ingress, identity, secrets, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Design graceful degradation strategies at the infrastructure level to maintain core functionality during overload or partial failure.
• Define performance budgets, SLOs, and capacity headroom for peak traffic and failure scenarios.
• Define SLOs, SLIs and error budgets and ensure they inform deployment, scaling, and incident response.
• Drive infrastructure‑as‑code and Git Ops practices to ensure consistent, repeatable environments.
• Define and enable progressive deployment models (canary, blue/green, rolling) with automated rollback.
• Build platform and CI/CD capabilities that directly improve deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• Embed security by design, including zero‑trust networking, mTLS, secrets management, and least privilege access.
• Establish standard observability for metrics, logs, traces, and health signals across the platform.
• Enable operational and incident response readiness, including runbooks, failure testing, and automated remediation.
• Act as the technical authority for platform architecture decisions and tradeoffs.
• Partner with engineering teams to onboard services and ensure alignment with platform standards.
• Provide reference architectures, patterns, and guidance that improve developer experience and delivery speed.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 8+ years of related experience as a Platform/ Solutions/ System Design Architect, Software Engineer, Senior Dev Ops Engineer or a role in similar capacity.
• Proven experience designing distributed systems with an emphasis on availability, scalability, resilience, and performance.
• Demonstrated expertise in microservices architecture, API design, and service‑to‑service communication patterns.
• Strong knowledge of system design principles including fault tolerance, capacity planning, dependency isolation, and failure handling.
• Experience leading or contributing to architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and cross‑team initiatives.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly document and explain complex system designs.

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The anticipated starting base pay for…