Senior Software Architect

Role: Senior Software Architect

Location: Bay Area, CA

Duration: Longterm Contract

Job Summary:

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Software Architect to lead the design and evolution of mission-critical, high-scale distributed platforms. This role requires deep hands-on expertise in API development, MongoDB, Python, and Java, with a strong record of architecting systems that process millions of transactions per day while meeting rigorous SLA, availability, security, and resiliency requirements.

The ideal candidate combines strategic architectural leadership with practical engineering depth. They will define technical direction, solve complex scalability and reliability challenges, establish engineering standards, and partner closely with product, platform, security, and engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect scalable, highly available, and resilient distributed systems supporting high transaction volumes and mission-critical workloads.
• Define end-to-end system architecture across APIs, services, data stores, asynchronous processing, caching, observability, and infrastructure.
• Design and govern enterprise-grade API platforms, including RESTful and/or event-driven APIs, API security, versioning, rate limiting, error handling, and backward compatibility.
• Lead architecture decisions for services built primarily in Python and Java, ensuring performance, maintainability, operational readiness, and secure coding practices.
• Design, optimize, and govern large-scale MongoDB deployments, including data modeling, indexing, sharding, replication, consistency, backup/recovery, and capacity planning.
• Establish reliability and resiliency patterns, including fault isolation, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and disaster recovery.
• Drive performance engineering, including load testing, bottleneck analysis, query optimization, API latency reduction, and scalability planning.
• Define observability standards across logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerting, SLOs, SLIs, and incident response.
• Partner with DevOps/SRE teams to improve production readiness, deployment automation, infrastructure reliability, and operational maturity.
• Conduct architecture reviews, establish technical standards, and mentor senior engineers and technical leads.
• Translate business and non-functional requirements into clear technical designs, roadmaps, trade-offs, and implementation plans.
• Lead root-cause analysis for critical production incidents and drive permanent corrective actions.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience in software architecture or technical leadership roles.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems supporting high throughput, high availability, and strict SLA requirements.
• Deep expertise in API design and development, including scalable service architectures, API lifecycle management, security, authentication/authorization, and performance optimization.
• Strong hands-on development experience in both Python and Java.
• Extensive enterprise-scale experience with MongoDB, including:
• Data modeling and scaling design
• Indexing and query optimization
• Replica sets and sharding
• Read/write scaling strategies
• High availability and disaster recovery
• Performance tuning and capacity planning
• Backup, restore, and data consistency strategies
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts, including eventual consistency, CAP trade-offs, concurrency, message delivery semantics, idempotency, and data partitioning.
• Demonstrated experience with cloud-native architectures, containerization, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Strong understanding of monitoring and observability practices, including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, SLOs, and incident management.
• Experience leading technical design discussions and influencing cross-functional stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building platforms in regulated, financial, telecommunications, healthcare, or other SLA-critical environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, service mesh, API gateways, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience with event streaming or messaging platforms such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent.
• Experience with caching technologies such as Redis.
• Familiarity with security architecture, secrets management, encryption, OWASP practices, and identity/access management.
• Experience modernizing legacy Python or Java platforms into scalable, cloud-native services.
• Experience leading teams through major platform migrations or reliability improvement programs.