Associate Architect - Software Engineering

About the Role

Responsible for providing technical leadership, driving solution design and implementation, and delivering scalable, secure, and high-quality enterprise software solutions. The role involves working with customers, architects, engineering teams, and project managers while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, BIAN standards, security, and banking requirements.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and guidance to engineering teams.
• Lead solution design, implementation, and technical decision-making across the SDLC.
• Define scalable architectures aligned with enterprise standards.
• Promote reusable design patterns, modular development, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
• Participate in requirements, architecture reviews, development, code reviews, testing, deployment, and production support.

BIAN & Banking Architecture – Mandatory

• Ensure architectural alignment with BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) standards.
• Design banking services and APIs aligned with BIAN service domains.
• Define microservices boundaries and support core banking integration.
• Apply enterprise API governance and integration standards.

API & Integration

• Drive Design-First API development using REST and OpenAPI/Swagger.
• Define API contracts, versioning, error handling, security, scalability, and reusability.
• Apply enterprise integration patterns and API governance best practices.

Technical Governance & Quality

• Review architecture, code quality, API specifications, and integration designs.
• Conduct peer code reviews and identify technical risks and architectural debt.
• Resolve complex technical issues and ensure delivery aligns with project timelines.
• Evaluate technologies based on security, compliance, maintainability, scalability, LTS, cost, and long-term viability.

Performance, Security & Compliance

• Design solutions meeting NFRs including performance, scalability, availability, reliability, maintainability, and security.
• Ensure monitoring, logging, and observability using ELK Stack or equivalent.
• Apply secure coding, JWT, RBAC, OWASP Top 10, and protection against CSRF/XSS.
• Ensure appropriate handling of PII and compliance with PCI DSS, GDPR, and banking regulations.
• Apply symmetric, asymmetric, and hybrid encryption principles.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT, or related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in enterprise application development.
• Strong experience in enterprise applications, APIs, microservices, and integration.
• Banking/financial services technology experience is highly desirable.
• Strong understanding of BIAN architecture is mandatory.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, mentoring, and problem-solving skills.

Technical Competencies

Java & Software Engineering

• Strong Java and OOP knowledge.
• Data types, String immutability, heap/memory management, memory leak analysis, exception handling, and Java annotations.
• Design patterns such as Singleton, Factory, Builder, and Strategy.
• Secure coding and SonarQube or equivalent code quality tools.

API & Integration

• REST APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning and governance.
• Request/response contract design, microservices, and enterprise integration patterns.

Banking Architecture

• BIAN Reference Architecture (Mandatory).
• DDD, banking service domains, enterprise API governance, and core banking integration.

DevSecOps & Quality

• Unit, API, and performance testing.
• Code reviews, CI/CD, production deployment, and incident troubleshooting.

NFRs

• Performance optimization, scalability, high availability, reliability, observability, security, monitoring, and logging.