Senior Application Architect

Job Title: Senior Application Architect

Location: Remote

Duration: / Term: Fulltime

Experience Desired: 18+ Years

 

Job Description:

We are seeking a Senior Application Architect to lead the design and architecture of enterprise-scale, cloud-native applications built on Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and AWS. This is a hands-on architecture role requiring deep expertise in event-driven systems, distributed application design, and AWS-native services.

The ideal candidate will be responsible for defining application architecture, reviewing solution designs, driving engineering best practices, and guiding development teams in building scalable, resilient, and highly available applications. The successful candidate should be equally comfortable designing solutions, reviewing code, troubleshooting complex production issues, and mentoring engineering teams.

 

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and design enterprise applications using Java, Spring Framework, and Spring Boot.
• Design and implement event-driven architectures leveraging Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda, Step Functions, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS.
• Lead architecture reviews and evaluate solution designs for scalability, resiliency, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Establish application architecture standards, reusable frameworks, and coding best practices.
• Design highly available, fault-tolerant, and resilient distributed systems.
• Review code and provide recommendations for improving modularity, performance, and maintainability.
• Guide engineering teams on Kafka streaming architecture, event processing, and asynchronous communication patterns.
• Design and review API strategies, service-to-service communication, and integration patterns.
• Collaborate with development, DevOps, cloud engineering, and product teams to deliver enterprise-grade solutions.
• Mentor engineers and serve as the technical authority on application architecture and cloud-native design.

Required Qualifications

• 18+ years of software development experience with at least 8 years as an Application Architect or Technical Architect.
• Expert-level experience with:

• Java
• Spring Framework
• Spring Boot
• Apache Kafka

• Strong experience designing event-driven and microservices-based architectures.
• Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS.
• Hands-on experience with Python for automation, serverless functions, or supporting services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous messaging, and enterprise integration patterns.

Core Technical Skills

Application Development

• Java
• Spring Framework
• Spring Boot
• Python
• RESTful APIs
• Microservices Architecture

Kafka Expertise

The ideal candidate should have extensive experience with Kafka streaming, including:

• Kafka cluster and node setup
• Topic design and partitioning strategies
• Producer and consumer design
• Consumer groups
• Offset management
• Error handling and retry strategies
• Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) implementation
• Message ordering and idempotency
• Performance tuning
• Debugging Kafka producers and consumers
• Monitoring and troubleshooting streaming applications

AWS Expertise

Hands-on experience designing applications using AWS services, including:

• AWS Lambda
• AWS Step Functions
• Amazon SQS
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon ECS/EKS (preferred)
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS IAM
• Amazon S3

Architecture & Integration

Strong experience with:

• Event-driven architecture
• Service routing
• API design and integration
• Service orchestration
• Error handling and exception management
• Distributed transaction patterns
• Resiliency and failover design
• High availability architecture
• Performance optimization
• Secure application integration

Database Experience

Working knowledge of application and database design with experience in one or more of:

• CockroachDB
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQL-based relational databases

Responsibilities include:

• Basic database schema design
• Data modeling
• Transaction management
• Query optimization
• Database integration with microservices

Leadership Expectations

• Lead architecture and design discussions across engineering teams.
• Evaluate existing applications and recommend architectural improvements.
• Drive adoption of engineering standards and best practices.
• Mentor developers and technical leads.
• Influence technical decisions through strong architectural leadership.
• Balance business priorities with scalable, maintainable technical solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or AWS CloudFormation).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified Developer – Associate.

 

Key Skills:

Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, Microservices