Principal Platform Infrastructure / Observability Architecture - Kafka, Kubernetes

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Principal, Platform Architecture

SALARY: $200k - $235k plus 30% bonus

LOCATION: Chicago, IL

Hybrid 3 days onsite

Looking for a candidate with 10+ years infrastructure platform architecture. Heavy Kubernetes, Kafka, apache flint, AWS. Observability

The Platform Architecture team is responsible for the infrastructure, cloud, networking, compute, storage, and observability tooling that critical market functions depend on. This is a hands-on architecture role with enterprise-wide impact.

Define and Own Platform Architecture

• 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
• Establish platform architecture standards and guardrails that application teams can build against reliably
• Ensure non-functional requirements availability, latency, throughput, recoverability are addressed at the platform level, not delegated to individual application teams

• 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 regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

Qualifications:

• 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
• Experience with brownfield/legacy environments alongside cloud-native programs
• Ability to produce clear, comprehensive architecture artifacts: diagrams, ADRs, reference architectures, and transition plans
• Strong communication skills able to present platform decisions to executive audiences and work through technical trade-offs with engineering teams

Technical Skills:

• Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed), Kafka, Apache Flink
• AWS foundational services: EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch
• GitOps tooling: ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform, 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)

Education and/or Experience:

• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience.