System Design Architect - Payment System

Responsibilities:

The role will be responsible for defining and governing the end-to-end architecture for the organization’s payment platforms, including the application layer, messaging layer,hub components, switching and routing functions, settlement interfaces, reconciliation systems, and reporting architecture. The incumbent will be expected to design robust and scalable systems capable of handling high transaction volumes, real-time and deferred processing, exception handling, and secure integration with external financial ecosystems.
A key responsibility of the role will be to establish architecture principles and design standards for the payment systems, ensuring consistency across all modules and interfaces. This includes driving best practices in application layering, service design, message processing, integration patterns, API design, queue-based and event-driven processing, and enterprise-wide canonical transaction modelling.
The candidate will also play a major role in shaping the technology stack and modernization roadmap for the payment vertical.
This includes evaluating and recommending suitable open-source components, frameworks, middleware, messaging solutions, and observability tools, while ensuring the right balance between cost optimization, supportability, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
The role will require strong architectural oversight on performance engineering, scalability, and resilience, including the design of systems for high throughput, low latency, peak-load handling, fault tolerance, high availability, disaster recovery, retry mechanisms, idempotency, and operational continuity. The candidate should be capable of guiding teams on performance optimization across application, database, messaging, and middleware layers.
Another important area of responsibility will be security and compliance by design. The role will be expected to ensure that security principles are deeply embedded into the architecture, including authentication, authorization, encryption, key management, certificate handling, HSM integration, auditability, non-repudiation, and secure API / message processing. The candidate will also work with information security and audit teams to ensure that the platform architecture aligns with internal and external security requirements.
The incumbent will be expected to provide architecture guidance on database and data management aspects as well, including OLTP design, partitioning strategy, archival and purging framework, indexing, concurrency handling, retention models, and transaction traceability.In addition, the role will oversee integration architecture involving middleware, MQ-based systems, external adapters, and system-to-system interoperability across the payment ecosystem.
From an organizational standpoint, the role will serve as a technical mentor and architectural authority for the application, infrastructure and overall engineering teams.The candidate will be expected to review major solution designs, mentor senior technical leads, participate in architecture review forums, and drive technical governance across projects and product lines.The role should also contribute to long-term strategy, modernization planning, platform standardization, and future technology adoption for the payment vertical.