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Job Title: Principal Architect

Reports to: Director, Technology Delivery

About the role:

The Principal Architect is a highly experienced, hands-on, senior individual contributor who is accountable for the long-term architectural vision, strategy, and technical standards for our mission-critical lending, data, and customer value platform.

This role balances deep, hands-on technical expertise in software, platform, and data architecture with the ability to influence and guide multiple engineering teams. The Principal Architect ensures that all technical domains are unified under a coherent, scalable, resilient, and secure enterprise architecture that directly supports the company’s mission and aggressive growth strategy.

Main Objectives & Responsibilities:

• Architectural Vision & Governance: Co-define and champion the long-term technical architecture and standards for the entire platform, ensuring alignment across software engineering, platform engineering, and data architecture domains.
• Technical Strategy & Architectural Oversight: Institute governance models that ensure architectural adherence, quality, and consistency across all technology domains and that decisions promote scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Platform & Data Excellence: Establish and promote best practices for platform engineering (DevOps & cloud) and data architecture, in line with a culture of system resilience and data integrity.
• Cross-Functional Enablement: Collaborate strategically with product managers, engineering managers, and business leaders to translate complex product vision into clear, robust, and well-governed technical architectures and execution plans.
• Hands-on Delivery & Mentorship: Contribute directly to production code in critical areas, acting as an additional technical coach for engineers and guiding the resolution of the most challenging technical problems.

Contribution & Impact:

This role is paramount for ensuring the architectural soundness of our core platform as the company evolves and scales. Your expertise will directly result in significantly reduced technical debt, improved system reliability, and an accelerated velocity for delivering new, market-enabling business capabilities. Key measures of success include the sustained stability and high-performance of the core Java and Clojure platform, and the successful, strategic integration of advanced technologies and architectural patterns such as AI-enabled systems and cloud-native solutions.

Key responsibilities:

1. Architectural Leadership and Mentorship
• Partner with the CTO, the Director of Technology Delivery, and Engineering Managers to define, communicate, and execute the technology strategy and architectural roadmap for the lending and data platforms.
• Lead the architectural design and review process for major platform initiatives.
• Help mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and architectural discipline.
• Define technology standards, development methodologies, and security best practices for the engineering organization.
2. Technical Excellence and Quality Assurance
• Help instill a culture of technical rigour, passionately advocating for approaches such as Test-Driven Development and secure coding practices.
• Lead complex code and design reviews, setting an uncompromisingly high bar for code quality, maintainability, and security across the platform.
• Identify, pilot, and promote emerging technologies and engineering practices, including cutting edge AI practices.
3. Technology Roadmapping for Software, Platform & Data
• Drive the architectural evolution towards service-based design, event-driven systems, and a modern, highly scalable data architecture.
• Shape the strategic direction for hosting infrastructure, containerisation, and CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with Platform Engineering.
• Review major technical designs and ensure alignment with the long-term system architecture and business objectives.
4. System Resilience and Data Governance
• Design and promote architectural patterns for high availability, fault tolerance, and security across the entire technology stack.
• Drive data modeling, data architecture, and the evolution of data store platforms to ensure data integrity, quality, and performance at scale.
• Proactively identify and resolve systemic architectural risk and technical debt.
5. Delivery Enablement and Performance Optimization
• Consult on the execution of the technical roadmap, providing architectural clarity and hands-on advice to unblock teams and accelerate delivery.
• Contribute directly to production code in critical architectural areas and highly complex situations (e.g., core domain logic, common libraries, performance-sensitivity), staying close to the technical implementation.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional experience in software development, cloud, DevOps, and architectural design, with a minimum of 3 years focused on architecting large-scale, distributed systems.
• Strong demonstrated expertise in multiple programming languages.
• Proven expertise in architectural design and operation of event-driven service-based architectures at large scale.
• Demonstrated ability to define and govern engineering best practices, including TDD and clean code principles.
• Experience with multiple data store management approaches (e.g., relational vs.  NoSQL databases), data modelling, and associated technologies.
• Expert-level knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps practices, containerisation, and public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with a track record of driving complex technical decisions across multiple teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong technical background and deep proficiency in Java and Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience or architectural oversight in Clojure or other functional programming languages.
• Proven experience with data architecture, data warehousing concepts, and ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Experience working in a regulated FinTech or financial services environment.

The ideal candidate is someone who:

• Is an architectural thinker: Functions as a self-driven technology leader capable of defining the future-state architecture, from initial concept to robust, production-ready system design.
• Is a strategic leader: Functions as a technical visionary, capable of defining and communicating a clear, long-term technical roadmap that aligns with Ezra’s mission to provide digital lending solutions.
• Is a hands-on architectural driver: Acts as a technical authority who can own projects end-to-end as well as support engineers in complex implementations.
• Builds architectural alignment: Excels at influencing, collaborating with, and guiding engineering leaders and product managers across multiple domains to achieve a cohesive, scalable system.
• Drives architectural excellence: Possesses the deep technical knowledge to guide and approve complex designs, ensuring scalability, resilience, and security across software, platform, and data layers.
• Ensures platform resilience: Proactively manages system risk, creates alignment around risk categorisation and treatment approaches, and co-owns outcomes.
• Champions quality: Is a passionate advocate for engineering and architectural best practices, driving a consistent standard for quality and performance.
• Embraces evolution: Stays current with industry trends, strategically integrating new technologies like AI and cloud-native tools while ensuring stability in the core platform.

Company overview:

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE. 

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL. 

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit. 
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand. 
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services 

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing. 

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure. 

But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.