Chief Architect

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.