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