Platform Architect

Platform Architect Own the technical architecture of the shared foundation everything at ONDC runs on. Delhi NCR (Work from Office) | 10+ years | Senior Individual Contributor About ONDC Open Network for Digital Commerce is a Section 8 not-for-profit building the protocol layer of India's digital commerce — an interoperable, open network that unbundles the storefront from the buyer experience so millions of small sellers, logistics providers and specialised platforms can transact across applications instead of being locked inside one. We run at the scale of India: 10 TB of data a day, 1 billion+ live entities, 300K+ requests per second, hundreds of Network Participants, and a long tail of sellers on patchy connectivity. Latency, correctness and observability are not features here — they are the product. That is where you come in. The Role We are looking for a Platform Architect to own the technical architecture of the shared foundation everything at ONDC is built on: the core network services, the internal developer platform our engineers ship through, and the multi-cloud infrastructure it all runs on. At ONDC, architects build. You will write and review code, prototype the hard parts yourself, and be in the room when something breaks at 300K RPS. You will set direction through working reference implementations, RFCs and golden paths — not through mandates. You sit alongside the AI Architect and Application Architect as one of a small set of architects who own a pillar each, and you partner closely with the Engineering Manager (Platform) who runs the team that builds with you. What You'll Own Own the end-to-end architecture of ONDC's core services — registry, gateway, protocol handling, identity and credentialing, catalog and search paths, and the reusable shared services every Network Participant depends on. Set the contracts: API and event design (REST, gRPC, event-driven), versioning and backward-compatibility policy, idempotency and retry semantics, and the failure modes an open network has to survive. Design for the properties that matter at this scale — p99 latency budgets, multi-tenancy and noisy-neighbour isolation, rate limiting at the edge, graceful degradation, and provable SLAs. Act as the technical gate on build-vs-reuse-vs-consolidate, stopping duplication before it ships. Define the golden paths — service templates, scaffolding, libraries, and paved-road defaults — so a new service arrives with CI/CD, observability, security and SLOs already wired in. Build the developer experience layer: self-service environments, deployment pipelines, secrets and config management, and runbook/on-call scaffolding. Establish observability as a platform capability — structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing and cost/performance telemetry available by default. Architect cloud-agnostic, portable systems across AWS / GCP / Azure — Kubernetes at the core, infrastructure as code, service mesh, API gateways and progressive delivery. Own the non-functional architecture: capacity planning, autoscaling, DR and multi-region strategy, RTO/RPO targets, and the unit economics of running national infrastructure responsibly. Author RFCs, reference architectures and reusable blueprints adopted across internal teams and, where appropriate, published for Network Participants to build against. What Success Looks Like You become the owner of ONDC's platform architecture — someone whose golden paths and reference implementations get adopted by default, and whose designs hold up at 300K RPS in production. What We're Looking For 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 4 years architecting platforms or shared services used by many teams — and still writing code today. Proven track record designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems in production, reasoning about consistency vs. availability, idempotency, backpressure and cascading failure in the same conversation. Deep API and systems design judgment across REST, gRPC and event-driven architectures, including versioning and contract evolution for consumers you do not control. Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers and at least one major cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure), plus infrastructure as code and modern delivery practice. Production experience with log-based brokers (Kafka or similar), relational stores (PostgreSQL or similar), caching layers and distributed-computing foundations. Demonstrated platform thinking — a history of turning repeated one-off needs into reusable building blocks that teams actually chose to adopt. Observability and operability literacy — you instrument before you ship, and have owned the dashboards that page someone at 2 a.m. Fluency with agent-assisted software development as a working practice, with clear judgment on when to use it and when not to. Excellent written communication — able to write an RFC that settles an argument and influence without authority across internal teams and external participants. Comfortable working in-office in Delhi NCR with a hands-on engineering team. A strong plus Exposure to ONDC, Beckn, UPI, Account Aggregator, ULI or other India DPI rails | experience building internal developer platforms or platform governance at scale | registries, gateways, identity/credentialing systems | payments, logistics or e-commerce domains. This Role Is For You If... You want to architect and still write the code, not hand off designs to be built by someone else. You think about golden paths and paved roads, not just individual services. You'd rather earn adoption through a working reference implementation than through a mandate. And you want your work to live in the open, as public infrastructure rather than private advantage. Why ONDC? Most architects spend a career making one company's stack a little better. This is the architecture that hundreds of companies and millions of small sellers will build on for the next decade. You won't just design the platform. You will still be the one debugging it at 300K RPS. Read more about ONDC (click to read) Visit our website at ondc.org McKinsey Report Our latest newsletter