Principal Architect — Data Platform & Lakehouse Who We Look For
We are looking for a Principal Architect — Data Platform & Lakehouse to own the technical direction of enterprise data architecture, lakehouse capabilities, metadata, analytical infrastructure, and document management across the UST FinX platform.
This is a senior, hands-on architecture and engineering role — not an advisory or governance-only position. Your influence will come from designing scalable platforms, building reusable frameworks, defining strong architectural patterns, writing production-grade code, and helping engineering teams deliver data infrastructure that is reliable, secure, governed, observable, and usable.
You understand that a modern lakehouse is much more than object storage with a query engine. It requires disciplined table and data design, catalog and metadata architecture, schema and partition evolution, governance, access control, lifecycle management, performance engineering, and clear ownership of data products.
You remain close to implementation: building frameworks and platform services, reviewing data contracts, debugging pipelines, evolving metadata and catalog capabilities, and solving difficult production problems.
In an AI-assisted development environment, you apply strong engineering judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output, ensuring that solutions meet high standards for correctness, resilience, security, scalability, and maintainability.
We value a collaborative, merit-driven engineering culture. Senior architects are expected to constructively challenge weak designs, reduce unnecessary complexity, establish reusable patterns, and help teams converge on sound technical decisions.
What You Will Do
Define and evolve the data platform and lakehouse architecture strategy for UST FinX.
Own the technical architecture of the lakehouse, including table design, catalog integration, schema and partition evolution, metadata, compaction, versioning, retention, performance, and governance.
Build reusable patterns, frameworks, and reference implementations for ingestion, storage, metadata, data access, analytics, document management, and data lifecycle management.
Provide technical ownership for enterprise data architecture across platform, integration, orchestration, document, and analytical capabilities.
Guide engineering teams on table design, catalog architecture, partitioning strategies, query performance, data lifecycle, and multi-tenant isolation.
Define standards for data contracts, metadata, lineage, governance, retention, access control, and data quality.
Work hands-on with platform services, ingestion frameworks, metadata services, storage abstractions, and supporting infrastructure.
Design ingestion patterns supporting batch, streaming, event-driven, change-data-capture, file-based, and API-based workloads.
Partner with backend, platform, data, security, DevOps, QA, product, and delivery teams to ship reliable and production-ready capabilities.
Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, code reviews, pairing, troubleshooting, and incident analysis.
Ensure data systems are secure, scalable, resilient, observable, cost-aware, and appropriate for regulated banking environments.
Reporting Line and Role Context
This role reports directly to the CTO of UST FinX.
You will operate as one of the CTO's senior technical leaders, creating engineering leverage across the organization while remaining deeply hands-on. You will influence multiple engineering teams, establish reusable standards, mentor technical leaders, and turn architectural direction into production-quality implementation.
This is not a passive advisory role or a traditional people-management position. Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, and execution.
You will work closely with the CTO to establish engineering standards, identify architectural and implementation gaps, raise delivery quality, and ensure that architecture is reflected in real code and operational behaviour.
The objective is to act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.
Skills and Experience We Are Looking For
About UST FinX
UST FinX is a financial technology initiative within UST, focused on modernizing core banking infrastructure for mid-sized and large financial institutions. Backed by UST’s global engineering scale and deep experience in financial services, we combine product engineering, systems integration, and managed services into a unified transformation offering.
Our approach is centered on progressive modernization: coexisting with legacy systems, enabling hybrid architectures, and gradually transitioning toward fully API-driven, event-driven, cloud-ready banking platforms. We align closely with industry standards such as BIAN and emphasize interoperability, scalability, resilience, security, and operational control.
UST FinX operates as a long-term transformation partner rather than a traditional vendor, working closely with clients to reduce operational risk, simplify complex system landscapes, strengthen engineering maturity, and deliver measurable business outcomes such as faster product delivery, improved efficiency, better operational insight, and lower infrastructure cost.
We are building the backend engineering foundation that enables the next generation of digital banking.
UST is a global digital transformation solutions provider. For more than 20 years, UST has worked side by side with the world’s best companies to make a real impact through transformation. Powered by technology, inspired by people and led by purpose, UST partners with their clients from design to operation. With deep domain expertise and a future-proof philosophy, UST embeds innovation and agility into their clients’ organizations. With over 30,000 employees in 30 countries, UST builds for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process.
