Role: System Architect
Number of openings: 1
Employment type: Full-time, on our company payroll
Location: Dehradun, Uttarakhand (primary). Willingness to travel within Uttarakhand is mandatory. Hybrid possible after onboarding.
Initial contract: 12 months, extendable based on performance and engagement continuity
Target onboarding: August 2026About the Role
Our Company is hiring a System Architect to lead the end-to-end solution design for a digital transformation programme in the water utility sector in Uttarakhand. This role is the technical anchor of the engagement — owning architecture decisions, integration strategy, security posture, and the technology roadmap.
This is a high-visibility, stakeholder-facing position. The Architect will be expected to defend technical decisions in front of senior officers, enterprise IT teams, and external advisors. Gravitas, clarity of thought, and the ability to articulate complex architecture in simple language matter as much as deep technical skill.
Purpose
Own the "how" at a strategic level. Translate business intent into a robust, secure, scalable, and future-proof solution architecture. Set the technical direction that engineering, vendors, and operations teams will follow.
Key ResponsibilitiesSolution architecture (core)
- Own the end-to-end solution architecture — from field-level IoT/sensors to cloud/on-prem application stack to dashboards and reporting.
- Produce High-Level Design (HLD), Low-Level Design (LLD) framework, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), reference architectures, and deployment topologies.
- Make and defend technology stack decisions (cloud vs on-prem vs hybrid, database choices, integration patterns, IoT protocols — LoRaWAN / NB-IoT / AMI / AMR).
- Design for non-functional requirements: scalability, availability, reliability, performance, observability, disaster recovery.
Integration architecture
- Design integrations across utility systems — billing, GIS, customer information, complaint management, SCADA, e-Office, payment gateways, identity, and reporting systems.
- Define API standards, data contracts, event schemas, and integration governance.
- Lead integration discussions with enterprise IT teams (NIC / state data centre / third-party vendors).
Security & compliance architecture
- Own the cybersecurity architecture — authentication, authorisation, encryption, key management, audit logging, secure SDLC.
- Ensure compliance with CERT-In guidelines, IT Act, data localisation/residency norms, and relevant ISO / NIST frameworks.
- Drive security audits, VAPT closures, and architecture sign-offs from client IT and audit teams.
Tech leadership
- Provide technical direction to the engineering team — coding patterns, design reviews, code-quality bar.
- Run Architecture Review Boards (ARB) — review designs from internal teams and vendors against the architecture standards.
- Mentor mid-level engineers and analysts on solution design and trade-off analysis.
Vendor & ecosystem management
- Evaluate and select hardware vendors (smart meters, sensors, IoT gateways, network equipment) for compatibility, scale, and total cost of ownership.
- Manage technical interfaces with hardware OEMs, telecom providers, and third-party software vendors.
- Negotiate SLAs and define acceptance criteria.
Stakeholder communication
- Present architecture to senior client stakeholders — engineers, IT heads, project directors, and external technical advisors — in clear, jargon-free language (in Hindi or English as required).
- Author technical sections of proposals, RFPs/RFIs responses, and project documentation.
- Defend architectural decisions in formal review meetings.
Mandatory Requirements
- Water sector or utility infrastructure exposure — must have worked on water utility / smart metering / SCADA / billing / NRW / smart-water / smart-city / utility-IT projects in an architecture or senior engineering capacity. Generic enterprise IT background without utility/infrastructure depth will not qualify.
- Architecture ownership — must have owned end-to-end solution architecture for at least one large programme as the named architect.
- Hindi fluency — speak & write. Must be able to lead architecture discussions, run reviews, and produce written summaries in Hindi when required.
- English fluency — speak & write. Must produce professional architecture documents, presentations, and technical proposals in English.
- Stakeholder presence. Confident, articulate, can hold their own in front of senior client engineers, IT heads, and external advisors. Able to translate dense architecture into simple, business-relevant terms.
- Travel readiness. Site visits to DMAs, treatment plants, pump houses, district offices, and state data centres across Uttarakhand.
Required SkillsArchitecture & design
- Proven track record of owning end-to-end solution architecture for at least one large-scale enterprise or government IT programme.
- Strong grasp of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, API design, message queues, caching, and database design (relational + NoSQL + time-series).
- Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP) — networking, IAM, compute, storage, managed services. Familiarity with on-prem state data centre constraints and hybrid deployment patterns.
- Hands-on experience with IoT architectures — device management, telemetry ingestion, edge processing, OTA updates, and protocols (MQTT, CoAP, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, AMI/AMR).
- Strong on integration patterns — REST, GraphQL, gRPC, ESBs, iPaaS, message brokers (Kafka / RabbitMQ), file/SFTP, legacy adapters.
Security & compliance
- Working knowledge of CERT-In guidelines, IT Act, data localisation norms, ISO 27001, NIST CSF, OWASP Top 10.
- Hands-on with TLS/PKI, OAuth2/OIDC, secrets management, secure key storage, encryption at rest/in transit, VAPT closures.
Technical leadership
- Has led engineering teams through full-lifecycle delivery (requirements → design → build → deploy → run).
- Strong code review and design review judgement. Comfortable saying "no" with reasoned alternatives.
Documentation & communication
- Excellent technical writing — HLD, LLD, ADRs, runbooks, architecture diagrams (C4 model, UML, deployment views).
- Tools: Lucidchart / draw.io / Enterprise Architect / Visio, Confluence, Jira.
Preferred Skills
- TOGAF 9 / TOGAF 10 certification, AWS/Azure/GCP Solutions Architect Professional, CISSP / ISO 27001 LA, ITIL
- Hands-on with GIS systems (Esri ArcGIS / QGIS / open-source GIS stacks) and SCADA platforms (Siemens, Schneider, Wonderware, etc).
- Smart meter ecosystem experience — AMI head-end systems, MDM (Meter Data Management), NB-IoT / LoRaWAN deployments at scale.
- Familiarity with MeitY / NIC / state data centre onboarding processes and empanelment.
- BI & analytics architecture — Power BI, Metabase, Grafana, Superset, time-series stores (InfluxDB / TimescaleDB / Prometheus).
- AI/ML on the edge — computer vision for meter reading (YOLO / similar), anomaly detection, demand forecasting.
- Familiarity with Uttarakhand geography / pahadi terrain. Knowledge of Garhwali or Kumaoni is an added advantage for fieldwork.
- Knowledge of NRW (Non-Revenue Water), DMA, bulk flow monitoring, customer metering, water balance, physical/commercial losses.
Education
- B.E. / B.Tech in Computer Science, IT, Electronics, Electrical, or Instrumentation. M.Tech / MS / MBA preferred.
Pay: ₹500,000.00 - ₹1,000,000.00 per year
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Dehradun, Uttarakhand