Job OverviewWe're looking for a Technical Architect to own the technical direction of our platform - designing scalable, secure, and maintainable systems while guiding engineering teams on implementation. You'll bridge the gap between high-level business requirements and concrete technical solutions, working closely with engineering, product, and security to ensure our architecture supports both current needs and future growth.
Major Responsibilities- Design and document system architecture for new products and major features, balancing scalability, reliability, security, and cost
- Set and evolve technical standards, patterns, and best practices across engineering teams
- Champion engineering excellence across the organization, driving adoption of best practices in code quality, test quality, design patterns, and enterprise architecture patterns.
- Define and promote testing strategy and standards (unit, integration, regression, chaos) across teams, ensuring quality is built into the architecture upfront
- Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and services for new initiatives
- Partner with engineering leads to review designs, identify risks, and unblock complex technical decisions
- Lead architecture reviews for major projects, including security and compliance considerations
- Drive decisions on system integration, data flow, and API design across services
- Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and scalability constraints
- Mentor engineers on architectural thinking and system design
- Guide the architecture and governance of AI/LLM initiatives, including model integration patterns, data usage, risk controls, and responsible AI practices.
- Own architecture and governance for agentic applications - including skills/tooling management, model selection and lifecycle management, and cost efficiency and optimization across AI workloads
- Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical roadmaps
- Stay current with emerging technologies and assess their relevance to the organization's needs
What We Value - 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in an architecture or technical leadership role
- Deep experience designing distributed systems, microservices, or data mesh architectures
- Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS) and infrastructure-as-code practices
- Proven track record of making and documenting architectural decisions (e.g., ADRs) at scale
- Experience with system design trade-offs: consistency vs. availability, latency, throughput, cost
- Strong understanding of security best practices, including identity/access management, encryption, and secrets management
- Excellent communication skills - able to explain technical trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and modern DevOps practices
- Experience working in the financial services industry, with working domain knowledge of financial instruments (equities, fixed income, derivatives, etc.), accounting/ledger principles, and market data systems and feeds.
- Strong background in domain model design and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles, including bounded contexts, aggregates, and ubiquitous language, with experience applying them to complex business domains
- Expert-level knowledge of unit, integration, and regression testing frameworks and methodology, with experience embedding test strategy into architecture decisions
- Experience architecting systems for trading, portfolio management, risk management, or accounting/reconciliation platforms
- Working understanding of frontend technologies and frameworks (e.g., Angular, React) sufficient to make informed full-stack architecture decisions
- General understanding of AI/LLM technologies and their application in enterprise systems (e.g., RAG, agentic workflows, model integration patterns)
- Experience with data architecture, including data warehousing and pipeline design
- Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Professional, TOGAF)
- Prior experience leading architecture reviews or technical governance boards
We anticipate the base salary of this role to be between $200,000-250,000. In addition to a base salary, the successful candidate will also be eligible to receive a discretionary year-end bonus.
In all respects, candidates need to reflect the following SFM core values:Smart risk-taking // Owner's Mindset // Teamwork // Humility // Integrity 
