Role description
Principal Platform Architect Who We Look For
We are looking for a Principal Platform Architect to define, build, and evolve the cloud platform and internal developer platform that underpin UST FinX's engineering organization.
This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role — not a people-management position.
Your influence will come from designing strong platform foundations, making sound architectural decisions, building production-grade infrastructure and platform capabilities, mentoring engineers, and raising engineering standards across multiple teams.
You will own the technical direction of our platform engineering capabilities across AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, automated delivery, observability, security, reliability, and developer experience.
The goal is not to build infrastructure independently for every project. You will create reusable platform capabilities that can support multiple products, clients, environments, and engineering teams consistently.
You understand that a platform is itself an engineering product used by other engineers. It must be reliable, secure, observable, automated, documented, maintainable, and easy to consume.
You remain close to implementation: reviewing architecture, building infrastructure and platform components, improving deployment automation, writing code, investigating production issues, and helping teams solve difficult operational problems.
You understand that good platform engineering is not simply about provisioning infrastructure. It requires balancing developer autonomy with standardisation, security with usability, abstraction with transparency, and delivery speed with operational control.
In an AI-assisted engineering environment, you apply strong technical judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output. Infrastructure and platform code must meet the same standards for correctness, resilience, security, maintainability, and operational safety as manually produced engineering work.
We value a collaborative, merit-driven engineering culture. Senior architects are expected to constructively challenge weak designs, simplify unnecessary complexity, make pragmatic technical decisions, and help the organisation converge on strong reusable engineering patterns.
What You Will Do
- Define and evolve the technical architecture of the UST FinX cloud platform and internal developer platform.
- Design and build reusable platform capabilities covering cloud foundations, runtime environments, networking, deployment, observability, security, configuration, and developer self-service.
- Work hands-on with AWS and Kubernetes-based production environments.
- Establish infrastructure-as-code patterns that allow environments and platform capabilities to be created, changed, reviewed, tested, and reproduced safely.
- Define automated delivery and GitOps practices covering deployment, environment promotion, rollback, release controls, configuration management, and policy enforcement.
- Design platform capabilities that can be reused consistently across products, clients, environments, and engineering teams.
- Define architectural patterns for cloud networking, identity and access management, workload isolation, security boundaries, deployment models, environment strategy, scalability, resilience, and disaster recovery.
- Build production-quality platform components including reusable infrastructure modules, automation, services, libraries, templates, and reference implementations.
- Design internal developer-platform capabilities that provide teams with clear, supported paths for building, deploying, operating, and observing applications.
- Establish self-service workflows that reduce unnecessary dependencies on central platform teams without weakening governance or operational controls.
- Define platform standards for application deployment, configuration, secrets, observability, health management, scaling, resilience, and production readiness.
- Guide teams in designing highly available systems that tolerate infrastructure failure and support predictable recovery.
- Establish observability standards covering metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, s, service health, and reliability objectives.
- Establish platform security patterns covering identity, access control, secrets, encryption, workload isolation, network security, software supply chain, and automated security controls.
- Help engineering teams understand and manage the operational and cost consequences of architectural decisions.
- Partner with backend, frontend, data, DevOps, QA, security, product, and client-facing teams so that the platform enables delivery rather than becoming an obstacle to it.
- Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, code reviews, pairing, troubleshooting, incident analysis, and technical direction.
- Ensure platform capabilities are deployable, observable, secure, scalable, recoverable, maintainable, and cost-aware from the start.
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, challenge weak designs, and turn technical direction into production-quality execution.
This is not a passive advisory role and not a traditional people-management position.
Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, execution, and your ability to make other engineers and teams more effective.
You will work closely with the CTO to define technical standards, identify engineering gaps, raise delivery quality, evolve the platform architecture, and ensure that architectural direction is reflected in real infrastructure, 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
- Minimum 8 years of experience across software engineering, cloud engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or architecture, ideally 10–15 years with meaningful ownership of production platforms.
- Strong experience designing and operating production cloud platforms on AWS.
- Strong understanding of cloud architecture including account and environment strategy, networking, identity and access management, workload isolation, security boundaries, availability, resilience, operational controls, and cost-aware design.
- Deep production experience with Kubernetes, including cluster architecture, workload scheduling, ingress and traffic management, autoscaling, service discovery, configuration, secrets, application lifecycle, deployment strategies, and production troubleshooting.
- Strong experience with infrastructure as code, including designing reusable infrastructure abstractions, modules, testing approaches, dependency management, and safe infrastructure evolution.
- Strong understanding of GitOps and modern CI/CD, including automated delivery, environment promotion, rollback, release controls, policy enforcement, and deployment safety.
- Experience designing and operating platforms across multiple environments, clients, products, or teams rather than infrastructure for a single application.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, including private and public connectivity, routing, load balancing, DNS, service-to-service communication, network isolation, and secure connectivity patterns.
- Strong understanding of identity and access management, least-privilege access, service identities, secrets management, encryption, and security boundaries.
- Strong understanding of observability, including metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, ing, service-level objectives, and production diagnostics.
- Strong production-engineering experience covering reliability, scalability, recoverability, performance, security, operability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
- Experience designing internal developer platforms, shared platform services, or reusable engineering capabilities consumed by multiple development teams.
- Strong understanding of platform-product principles, including developer experience, self-service, sensible defaults, supported paths, documentation, discoverability, and reducing cognitive load for delivery teams.
- Experience building reusable platform abstractions without hiding operational behaviour to the point that teams cannot understand or troubleshoot their systems.
- Experience with production incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity problems, infrastructure failures, deployment failures, and complex operational troubleshooting.
- Strong software-engineering capability and the ability to contribute code, automation, infrastructure modules, libraries, tools, or services rather than operating exclusively at architecture level.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain architecture decisions, trade-offs, risks, and operational consequences clearly to globally distributed engineering teams.
- Strong mentoring capability and the ability to establish technical direction without relying on formal authority.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing and building an internal developer platform or platform product consumed by multiple engineering teams.
- Experience creating reusable engineering capabilities rather than project-specific infrastructure.
- Experience designing cloud environments that support multiple clients, tenants, products, or organisational boundaries while maintaining appropriate isolation.
- Experience designing self-service capabilities for environment provisioning, application deployment, configuration, operational tooling, or other recurring engineering activities.
- Experience with advanced Kubernetes networking, traffic-management, ingress, service-to-service communication, and workload-security patterns.
- Experience designing highly available and resilient distributed platforms across multiple availability zones or equivalent failure domains.
- Experience with API-first, event-driven, microservice, and integration-heavy enterprise architectures.
- Strong software development experience where platform capabilities interact with backend services, APIs, automation, or shared engineering libraries.
- Experience building developer tooling, automation, command-line utilities, portals, APIs, or other interfaces that improve developer experience.
- Experience with policy-as-code, automated governance, security automation, secrets management, software supply-chain security, vulnerability management, and compliance-oriented controls.
- Experience implementing platform observability across infrastructure and applications, including common standards for telemetry, correlation, dashboards, ing, and operational diagnostics.
- Experience designing backup, recovery, disaster-recovery, and business-continuity strategies for critical cloud platforms.
- Experience implementing safe deployment approaches including progressive delivery, automated rollback, health validation, and controlled environment promotion.
- Experience designing platforms for financial services, banking, payments, or other regulated environments where security, auditability, resilience, segregation, and operational control are critical.
- Experience evaluating competing platform technologies based on reliability, operational complexity, developer experience, portability, cost, ecosystem maturity, and long-term maintainability rather than technology preference.
- Experience living with the long-term consequences of platform architecture decisions — supporting, patching, debugging, scaling, securing, migrating, and evolving a platform after widespread organisational adoption.
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 financial-services experience, we combine product engineering, systems integration, and managed services into a unified transformation offering.
Our approach is based on progressive modernization: allowing modern and legacy systems to coexist while institutions progressively move toward API-driven, event-driven, cloud-ready banking platforms.
We emphasize interoperability, scalability, resilience, security, strong engineering practices, and operational control.
UST FinX operates as a long-term transformation partner, helping financial institutions reduce operational risk, simplify complex technology landscapes, strengthen engineering maturity, and accelerate the delivery of new banking capabilities.
We are building the platform engineering foundation that enables the next generation of digital banking.
Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Vulnerability Management, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, CI/CD, GitOps, Grafana, Infrastructure as Code, Observability
About UST
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.
