Lead / Principal Architect – Distributed Systems (Product & BFSI)

Hiring for: An exciting InsurTech startup building an AI-native stack for the Insurance.

Role: Lead / Principal Architect – Distributed Systems (Product & BFSI- Event Driven)

Experience: 10 - 18 years

Positions: 1

Location: Bangalore, Mumbai

Workplace Type: On-site (5 days WFO)

Employment Type: Permanent

Salary Range: INR 60LPA - 1Cr

Role Overview

We are looking for a seasoned Architect with 10+ years of experience designing and building complex, mission-critical systems in regulated domains such as insurance, banking, payments, or lending. This role requires deep architectural expertise, strong systems thinking, hands-on engineering capability, and the ability to work across multiple domains and customer contexts. The ideal candidate has solved hard distributed systems problems, worked in high-growth startup environments, and is comfortable integrating modern AI and agentic AI capabilities into production-grade platforms.

Core Responsibilities

1. Architecture & System Design

● Own end-to-end system architecture for large-scale, distributed, event-driven systems.

● Design systems using patterns such as:

○ Event Sourcing

○ CQRS

○ Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

○ Hexagonal / Ports & Adapters architecture

● Drive architectural decisions around consistency models, scalability, observability, resiliency, and fault tolerance.

● Lead design reviews and establish architectural guardrails across teams.

2. Complex Domain Modeling

● Translate complex business domains (e.g., underwriting, risk, payments orchestration, lending lifecycle, claims processing) into clean, bounded contexts.

● Design for auditability, traceability, versioning, and regulatory compliance.

● Build extensible domain models that can evolve without breaking downstream systems.

3. AI & Agentic Systems Integration

● Architect and build systems that integrate AI components into operational workflows.

● Design agentic AI systems that:

○ Interact with structured enterprise systems

○ Execute actions via controlled workflows

○ Operate within compliance and governance boundaries

● Integrate LLM-driven components into event-driven backends with deterministic safeguards.

4. Hands-on Engineering

● Contribute meaningfully to code in critical components.

● Establish engineering standards for:

○ Code quality

○ Testing strategy (unit, integration, contract)

○ CI/CD pipelines

○ Infrastructure as Code

● Prototype new architectural approaches and validate trade-offs.

5. Cross-Domain & Customer Engagement

● Work across multiple industry domains and customer contexts.

● Engage directly with enterprise customers to:

○ Understand business and regulatory constraints

○ Translate requirements into technical blueprints

○ Support solution design and implementation

● Guide implementation teams during complex delivery programs.

6. Technical Leadership & Project Management

● Lead large initiatives from concept to production.

● Break down complex architectural work into executable milestones.

● Coordinate across product, engineering, and customer stakeholders.

● Identify risks early and define mitigation strategies.

Required Experience

● 10+ years of software engineering experience.

● Significant experience building systems in at least one of:

○ Insurance

○ Banking

○ Payments

○ Lending

● Demonstrated experience designing and operating complex distributed systems.

● Deep practical expertise in:

○ Event Sourcing

○ CQRS

○ DDD

○ Hexagonal architecture

● Experience designing event-driven systems using platforms such as Apache Kafka or similar.

● Strong understanding of data consistency models, concurrency control, and transactional boundaries.

● Experience integrating AI/ML systems into enterprise software stacks.

● Prior exposure to agent-based or autonomous workflow systems.

● Hands-on coding experience in one or more modern backend ecosystems (e.g., Java/Kotlin).

● Experience working in startup environments with high ownership and ambiguity.

● Experience working with enterprise customers and multi-stakeholder environments.

● Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

● Experience building ledger-based or state-replayable systems.

● Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal.

● Experience building rule engines or policy execution layers.

● Exposure to cloud-native architecture on AWS / GCP / Azure.

● Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS systems.

● Familiarity with zero-downtime migrations and schema evolution strategies.

● Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading architecture councils.

What We Value

● Systems thinking over feature thinking.

● Bias for clarity in modeling complex domains.

● Strong opinions, loosely held — grounded in trade-off analysis.

● Ability to operate at both whiteboard and production-debug levels.

● Comfort working on deep, non-trivial problems that require iteration and rigor.