Director of Technology – Chief Architect

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Poland.

📋 Description

• Define the technical vision and evolve into managing the architecture of a cloud platform comprising hundreds of Java microservices.

• Acquire in-depth knowledge of the production platform within the initial 90 days by collaborating with the teams that developed it.

• Assume responsibility for the architectural domain, starting with the data and transaction layer, followed by service architecture and the cloud platform.

• By the conclusion of the first year, take full ownership of the platform's architecture and establish its strategic direction for future years.

• Design systems, conduct code and schema reviews, establish engineering standards, and lead engineering and technology teams.

• Articulate technology strategy and trade-offs to executives, business partners, and regulators.

• Oversee microservices architecture, including service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and inter-service communication.

• Design high-volume, low-latency, real-time transaction processing systems that ensure strong consistency and idempotency guarantees.

• Define patterns for distributed transactions, retries, and failure recovery.

• Lead architecture reviews and maintain architectural decision records across numerous services.

• Identify and minimize architectural debt; evolve legacy services without interrupting live traffic.

• Establish Java engineering standards, encompassing frameworks, libraries, build tools, coding practices, and JVM tuning.

• Manage database strategy across relational, NoSQL, caching, and streaming platforms.

• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks related to JVM, network, and data layers.

• Guide cloud architecture, encompassing containers, Kubernetes, managed data services, networking, and infrastructure as code.

• Set SLOs, observability standards, and incident response practices.

• Promote scalability, resilience, disaster recovery, and cloud cost efficiency.

• Ensure that security, data protection, and auditability adhere to gaming regulatory and payment standards.

• Build, lead, and mentor engineering and technology teams while enhancing hiring standards.

• Translate business objectives into technology roadmaps and project plans.

• Manage technical vendors and third-party platforms.

• Assess new technologies and tools.

• Communicate technology strategy and associated risks to the CEO, executives, and partners.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 12 years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ years as an architect for large distributed systems.

• Expert-level proficiency in Java (Java 17+), with extensive knowledge of Spring Boot/Spring Cloud, concurrency, and JVM performance tuning and garbage collection.

• Proven history of designing and managing a microservices architecture with over 100 services in production.

• Hands-on experience with systems processing millions of real-time transactions daily, meeting measurable latency and uptime objectives.

• Deep expertise in databases: relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle) covering query optimization, indexing, sharding, and replication, alongside NoSQL and caching solutions (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis).

• Experience with event-driven architecture using Kafka or a similar streaming platform.

• Production experience on AWS or GCP, with proficiency in Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar).

• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles: consistency models, idempotency, partitioning, backpressure, and failure modes.

• Experience in API design (REST, gRPC), API gateways, and service mesh concepts.

• Familiarity with observability and reliability practices: Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog or similar; SLOs and incident management.

• Experience in leading and developing engineering teams, as well as evaluating and interviewing technical candidates.

• Effective communicator with executives, peers, and individual contributors.

• Background in gaming, iGaming, sweepstakes/social casino, sports betting, fintech, or payments is preferred.

• Experience with wallet, ledger, or payment systems requiring transaction reconciliation is preferred.

• Familiarity with gaming regulations, PCI DSS, or SOC 2 compliance requirements is preferred.

• Led migration or re-platforming initiatives from monoliths or legacy services to microservices without downtime is preferred.

• Experience with reactive or non-blocking Java (WebFlux, Vert.x, Netty) for high-throughput services is preferred.

• Proven ability in cloud cost optimization (FinOps) at scale is preferred.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.

• 401(k) plan with matching contributions.

• Paid time off and holidays.

• Additional programs.