Platform Architect

Location: Durham, NC — Hybrid, 3 days onsite / 2 days remote

Employment Type: Full-Time, Direct Hire

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Platform Architect to support a major companywide platform rewrite within a growing financial services environment. This is a highly visible role that combines deep technical architecture expertise with strong business and executive-facing communication.

The Platform Architect will design and lead end-to-end architecture solutions supporting complex financial platforms. This person will partner closely with software engineers, product owners, business stakeholders, and technology leadership to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions that engineering teams can build and implement.

The role will have a strong focus on financial data, system integrations, backend business logic, APIs, data models, and how financial information and transactions move across enterprise systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end architecture for a major enterprise platform modernization and rewrite.
• Translate business requirements into technical architecture, solution designs, and detailed specifications for engineering teams.
• Design data models, APIs, backend services, integrations, and system-to-system data flows.
• Architect systems that process and manage financial data, calculations, business rules, and financial transactions.
• Define how financial and business data is represented, stored, transferred, and consumed across applications.
• Partner directly with software engineers and product owners throughout the design and development lifecycle.
• Validate backend and server-level business logic, including financial calculations, rules, and transaction processing.
• Design and support backend/frontend integrations and headless architecture patterns.
• Use SQL and database knowledge to understand data structures, relationships, queries, and system behavior.
• Create architecture artifacts including solution designs, sequence diagrams, component diagrams, deployment diagrams, and technical specifications.
• Provide architectural guidance to engineering teams throughout development and implementation.
• Partner with business leaders and executives to explain architecture decisions, technical tradeoffs, risks, and business impacts.
• Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with broader business and technology objectives.
• Work within a modern cloud-based, Agile engineering environment.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience across solutions architecture, platform architecture, product technology, software engineering, data, or related technical roles.
• Bachelor's degree required.
• At least 2 recent years of experience within financial services, banking, insurance, fintech, or a similar financial technology environment.
• Direct experience architecting systems that handle financial data, including financial transactions, movement and representation of money, financial calculations, or financial business rules.
• Technical foundation in software development, engineering, data, product technology, or a related hands-on technical discipline before moving into architecture or system design.
• Strong experience designing APIs, backend services, data models, integrations, and system-to-system data flows.
• Strong data architecture experience with an understanding of how data moves between systems and how financial and business data is stored and managed.
• Strong SQL and relational database knowledge, including querying, joins, data relationships, and database navigation.
• Ability to understand and validate backend business logic and financial calculations.
• Experience with backend/frontend integrations and headless architecture patterns.
• Experience working directly with software engineers, product owners, and business stakeholders on in-house development teams.
• Experience translating business requirements into technical solutions and specifications engineers can execute against.
• Experience within modern cloud environments; AWS experience strongly preferred.
• Experience working in Agile software development environments.
• Strong executive-facing and stakeholder communication skills with the ability to balance technical requirements with business objectives.
• Ability to create and communicate sequence diagrams, component diagrams, deployment diagrams, solution designs, and other technical architecture documentation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience.
• Experience supporting large-scale platform modernization, transformation, or system replacement initiatives.
• Experience with annuity, retirement, insurance, banking, or other transaction-heavy financial platforms.