Associate Architect

Job Description –

Associate Architect (Full Stack)

Experience: 7–10 Years

About the Role Mpokket is looking for a hands-on Associate Architect to design, build, and evolve scalable, resilient, and secure enterprise applications. The ideal candidate should possess strong backend engineering expertise, solid system design skills, and experience building cloud-native distributed systems. The role requires balancing architecture, hands-on development, technical leadership, production excellence, and mentoring engineers.

Key Responsibilities ● Design scalable, resilient, and highly available distributed systems. ● Define solution architecture and drive technical design discussions. ● Design and review microservices, REST APIs, and event-driven architectures. ● Collaborate with engineering teams to build secure, high-performance applications. ● Review architecture, design, and code to ensure engineering best practices. ● Identify and address scalability, reliability, performance, and security challenges. ● Drive production readiness through observability, monitoring, and operational excellence. ● Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices. ● Work closely with Product, Engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams to deliver high-quality software. ● Stay current with emerging technologies and modern software engineering practices.

Must Have Skills

Backend Development ● Strong programming experience in Java (17+) ● Hands-on experience with Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security ● Strong understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), SOLID Principles, and Design Patterns ● Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs ● Experience building scalable, high-performance backend applications

System Design & Architecture ● Strong understanding of Microservices Architecture ● Experience designing scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant distributed systems ● Strong knowledge of: ○ High Availability (HA) ○ Scalability ○ Event-Driven Architecture ○ API Gateway ○ Caching ○ Load Balancing ○ Rate Limiting ○ Circuit Breaker Pattern ○ Retry Mechanisms ○ Idempotency ○ Distributed Transactions ○ Performance Optimization ○ Secure Application Design ● Experience participating in architecture reviews and technical design discussions

Databases ● Strong experience with: ○ MySQL ○ PostgreSQL ○ MongoDB ○ Redis ● Experience with: ○ Database Design ○ Query Optimization ○ Indexing ○ Transactions ○ Performance Tuning ○ High Availability and Replication

Messaging & Event Streaming ● Hands-on experience with: ○ Apache Kafka ○ RabbitMQ ● Experience building asynchronous and event-driven systems ● Understanding of: ○ Producer/Consumer patterns ○ Consumer Groups ○ Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) ○ Retry Strategies ○ Message Ordering ○ Message Durability

Cloud & Platform ● Hands-on experience with AWS and/or GCP ● Experience with cloud-native application development ● Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes ● Understanding of container orchestration, deployment strategies, scaling, and production operations

Frontend (Architecture & Operations) ● Working knowledge of frontend application architecture from a deployment and operations perspective ● Understanding of frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.js ● Experience with frontend deployment, CDN/Web Server configuration, authentication flows, API integration, monitoring, and production troubleshooting ● Ability to collaborate effectively with frontend engineering teams to design end-to-end solutions

Observability & Production Engineering Hands-on experience with one or more of: ● Datadog ● New Relic ● ELK Stack ● Grafana ● Prometheus Experience with: ● Application Monitoring ● Distributed Tracing ● Log Analysis ● Alerting ● Root Cause Analysis (RCA) ● Performance Monitoring ● Production Incident Management

Technical Leadership ● Experience leading architecture and technical design discussions ● Experience mentoring engineers ● Strong communication and stakeholder management skills ● Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities

Nice to Have

Programming & Platform ● Python ● OpenTelemetry ● Elasticsearch ● CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) ● Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)

AI / ML ● Basic understanding of AI/ML concepts and practical enterprise use cases ● Experience building or integrating AI-powered applications ● Exposure to AI/LLM frameworks such as: ○ LangChain ○ LlamaIndex ○ Spring AI ○ CrewAI ○ AutoGen ○ Semantic Kernel ●

Familiarity with: ○ Large Language Models (LLMs) ○ Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) ○ AI Agents ○ Vector Databases ○ MCP (Model Context Protocol) ● Experience using AI-powered developer tools such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar

Architecture ● Domain Driven Design (DDD) ● Clean Architecture ● Hexagonal Architecture ● API Gateway platforms ● Service Mesh ● Feature Flag platforms

Domain Experience Experience in one or more of the following domains: ● FinTech ● Digital Lending ● Payments ● Banking ● Financial Services

Candidate Profile ● 7–10 years of software engineering experience with a strong backend engineering background. ● Proven experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems in production. ● Hands-on engineer with an architectural mindset. ● Passionate about solving complex engineering problems and improving system reliability. ● Strong ownership, collaboration, and mentoring skills. ● Comfortable working across architecture, development, production support, and engineering excellence initiatives.

Recruiter Screening Checklist Mandatory ● ✔ 7–10 years of experience ● ✔ Java & Spring Boot ● ✔ Microservices Architecture ● ✔ System Design ● ✔ MySQL / PostgreSQL ● ✔ MongoDB ● ✔ Redis ● ✔ Kafka ● ✔ RabbitMQ ● ✔ AWS and/or GCP ● ✔ Docker & Kubernetes ● ✔ Datadog / New Relic / ELK / Grafana / Prometheus ● ✔ Experience designing scalable distributed systems ● ✔ Working knowledge of frontend deployment and operations ● ✔ Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical initiatives

Preferred ● ✔ Python ● ✔ AI/ML exposure ● ✔ LangChain / LlamaIndex / Spring AI / CrewAI / AutoGen ● ✔ Cursor / GitHub Copilot / Claude Code ● ✔ OpenTelemetry / Elasticsearch ● ✔ FinTech / Payments / Banking / Digital Lending experience