Principal Platform Architect - Kafka, Flint, Kubernetes, Observability

***Hybrid, 3 days onsite, 2 days remote***

***We are unable to sponsor as this is a permanent full-time role***

A prestigious company is looking for a Principal Platform Architect (Kafka, Flint, Kubernetes, Observability).

Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture design and decision-making for core platform capabilities: container orchestration, streaming infrastructure, cloud architecture, CI/CD and GitOps pipelines, and observability
• Develop and maintain target-state platform architectures with clear transition plans from current state
• Own reference architectures for Kubernetes-based workloads, Kafka streaming topologies, Flink stream processing, and AWS infrastructure patterns
• Architect and guide migration of workloads to cloud-native patterns on AWS, including compute, networking, storage, and security services
• Define GitOps model infrastructure-as-code practices, pipeline standards, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale
• Partner with Application Architecture to ensure platform capabilities match application design requirements particularly for high-throughput, low-latency clearing workloads
• Engage Engineering and operations teams to ensure platform designs are buildable, operable, and supportable not just theoretically sound
• Establish observability standards logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting as a platform-level capability, not an afterthought
• Define capacity planning and performance engineering practices for platform infrastructure
• Participate in incident reviews and post-mortems; translate operational findings into durable platform architecture improvements
• Ensure platform architecture satisfies company regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

Qualifications:

• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture roles with demonstrated ownership of enterprise-scale platform decisions
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operational patterns at scale
• Hands-on experience architecting Apache Kafka deployments topic design, partitioning strategy, consumer group patterns, schema management, and operational concerns
• Practical experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks job design, state management, and deployment on Kubernetes
• Strong AWS architecture experience VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, networking, and security services
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing GitOps pipelines infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, secrets management, and release automation using tools such as Flux, ArgoCD, Terraform, or Helm
• CI/CD pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
• Unix/Linux environments; container and image management (Docker, NexArtifactory)