Cloud Architect

Job Title: Java Architect

Location: London, UK (Hybrid)

Industry: Banking / Financial Services

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced Java & AWS Cloud Architect to lead the design and delivery of large-scale, secure, and resilient microservices-based solutions within the banking domain. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, cloud-native architecture on AWS, and DevOps practices, with a proven track record of designing enterprise-grade systems and driving cloud modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Solution Design

• Define end-to-end architecture for microservices, APIs, integrations, and data flows.
• Create solution blueprints, sequence diagrams, and AWS reference architectures.
• Drive non-functional requirements including scalability, availability, performance, reliability, DR, and observability.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Design secure, scalable, and cost-optimized AWS solutions using services such as EKS/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, ElastiCache, MSK/Kinesis, CloudWatch, IAM, and KMS.
• Establish CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure using Terraform/CloudFormation.
• Define environment strategies across dev, test, staging, and production.

Engineering Leadership

• Provide hands-on technical guidance in Java/Spring Boot and microservices best practices.
• Review code and architecture designs, enforce standards, and mentor engineering teams.
• Collaborate with Product, Security, SRE, and QA teams to ensure end-to-end delivery.

Security & Compliance

• Implement secure design principles including encryption, secrets management, OAuth2/OIDC, network segmentation, and least-privilege IAM.
• Ensure alignment with industry standards such as OWASP, NIST, CIS Benchmarks, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.

Observability & Resilience

• Define logging, metrics, and tracing using OpenTelemetry and CloudWatch.
• Design for high availability and disaster recovery with multi-AZ setups, backups, and RPO/RTO targets.
• Implement resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, retries, and backoff strategies.

Governance & Stakeholder Management

• Translate business requirements into architecture roadmaps and technical decisions.
• Present solutions to senior stakeholders and manage risks, dependencies, and cloud costs.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience: 10–15 years overall, with 4–6 years in an architecture role designing distributed systems at scale.

Core Technologies:

• Java 11+/17, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, JPA/Hibernate, RESTful APIs.
• Microservices architecture, DDD, BFF patterns, event-driven systems.

AWS Cloud:

• EKS/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, MSK/Kinesis, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, Route 53, ALB/NLB, VPC, Subnets, NACLs, Security Groups.

DevOps & Containerization:

• CI/CD using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab.
• IaC with Terraform/CloudFormation.
• Docker and Kubernetes.

Messaging & Integration:

• Kafka/MSK, SQS/SNS, gRPC, REST, webhooks, and integration gateways.

Databases & Caching:

• SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora), NoSQL (DynamoDB/DocumentDB), Redis/ElastiCache.

Architecture Competencies:

• Designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems.
• Performance tuning, capacity planning, and AWS cost optimization.
• Strong understanding of networking, TLS, DNS, routing, and cloud security.

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Strong documentation and presentation abilities.
• Proven leadership with the ability to mentor teams and drive engineering best practices.