Software Architect II

Team: Architecture

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Commitment: Full Time

Workplace Type: hybrid

Job Responsibilities

Possess and demonstrate fantastic organizational, time management, conceptualization, communication, and problem-solving skills.
Deep understanding of architectural design patterns, their strengths and weaknesses, and when it’s appropriate to use them end to end, ensuring measurable success criteria and timely stakeholder communication.
Align Architectural Designs to business outcomes and Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) with disciplined execution—clear standards, traceability, and on-time deliverables. Capture trade-offs and approvals in Architecture Decision Records (ADR).
Collaborate with Product Managers and Owners, SRE/Platform, Security, Data, QA and Development Managers, producing concise, audit-ready artifacts.
Practice ticket and time management (daily time logs; prompt open/update/close of tickets)
Translate Requirements into Architectural Designs that meet Functional and non-Functional Requirements (Availability, Latency, Throughput, Security) with versioning, change control, and well-defined rollout and rollback plans.
Follow Architectural and industry best practices, standards, and patterns. Escalate and communicate exceptions as-needed
Contribute to security-by-design, e.g. threat model inputs, as it applies to architectural designs using approved patterns and templates; escalate exceptions with rationale and impact. Capture trade-offs and approvals in Architecture Decision Records (ADR).
Participate in incident lifecycle; lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) synthesis for Architecture as applicable
Develop and document Proofs-of-Concept (PoC) to vet, test, and explain Architectural Designs; to act as reference code and support/unblock engineering teams
Executive-ready polish of domain documentation (clear narrative, crisp diagrams, explicit risks/assumptions)
Maintain hands-on involvement writing code for PoCs, creation of frameworks, packages, examples, etc.
Schedule and conduct inter-team and intra-team Arch Design review sessions
Participate in Development Team pull requests as-needed to ensure alignment with guidelines and practices
Author documentation (Architectural Designs, API Model Definitions, Data Models/Schemas, Swimlane Diagrams) & review documentation for completeness
Participate in / lead design reviews; record decisions as Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
Create migration and technical-debt plans with milestones
Produce high-level multi-system diagrams & outlines (C4 , cross-system sequence flows, and swimlanes) 

Required Skills & Experience

A minimum of 6 years of experience as a Software Developer/Engineer or 2 years of experience as a Software Architect I working with .Net/C# on a daily basis.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, and conceptual skills.
Good grasp of software architecture principles including SOLID, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and Clean Architecture
Ability to work under pressure and meet tight deadlines.  This includes strong decision making and collaboration with Managers, Leads, Architects, Principals, and others to design/develop right-sized solutions accordingly.
Strong understanding of current Microsoft development technologies.  Strong understanding of surrounding technologies, cloud architecture and services, and other 3rd party tools and services relevant to FreedomPay.
Possess great organizational and self-managerial skills.  Also be comfortable with priority shifting, focus shifting, as the business may dictate and rally the team to be flexible.
Ability to anticipate potential problems and determine and implement solutions.
Ability to deal with ambiguity and drive through to the details.
Strong English reading and writing communication skills, with an ability to express and understand complex technical concepts.  As other languages are a requirement, that will be explicitly noted during the recruitment process.
At least a BS/BA Degree in MIS, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

What makes you stand out:

A demonstrable track record of developing scalable services and applications in fast-paced environments and supporting those projects in both Regional Production and Disaster Recovery environments.
Hands-on experience working with technologies such as Redis, Kafka, EventHubs, Memcached.
A mindset focused on performance, security, and maintainability.
An understanding of event-driven architecture and distributed systems.
Working knowledge of both SQL and NoSQL databases.
A Confluent Certified Developer
A Redis Certified Developer