Sr. Architect - Java Microservices

Technical Architect – Product Engineering

Experience: 15+ Years

Location: Pune, India

Employment Type: Full-time

Desired Skills: Python, Technical Architecture, AWS, Microservices, SaaS / Multi-tenant Architecture, Kubernetes, System Design

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Technical Architect to lead the architecture, design, and technical evolution of an enterprise SaaS product. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring deep technical expertise, strong product engineering experience, and the ability to build scalable, secure, and high-performance platforms.

The ideal candidate should be passionate about solving complex engineering problems, driving innovation, mentoring development teams, and effectively leveraging AI to accelerate software development.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the overall product architecture and technical roadmap.
• Design and build scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise applications.
• Lead the design and implementation of new product features from concept to production.
• Remain hands-on with coding and contribute to critical product components.
• Drive architecture reviews, code quality, performance optimization, and engineering best practices.
• Lead cloud architecture, security, scalability, and DevOps initiatives.
• Evaluate and adopt modern technologies to improve product capabilities and engineering efficiency.
• Leverage AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) to accelerate software development, code reviews, testing, documentation, debugging, and productivity.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 15+ years of software product engineering experience with at least 5 years in a Technical Architect role.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and modern backend frameworks.
• Deep experience with AWS services and cloud-native application architecture.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Experience designing microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Experience with scalable SaaS platforms, multi-tenant architectures, and secure application design.
• Excellent understanding of software design patterns, performance tuning, observability, and system reliability.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

Overview:

We are looking for a Principal Architect for a Private Equity backed, fast growing AI First Product Engineering Services firm.

This role will be a key member of the core leadership team of the firm.

He/ She will serve as a strategic technical leader, solution designer, and customer advisor. In this role, you will combine deep and broad-based technical expertise with strong business acumen to architect high-value solutions, lead pre-sales engagements, and mentor our practice/CoE team. You will work closely with customers to understand their business needs, translate them into scalable technical solutions, and guide delivery teams in successful implementation.

Responsibilities:

1. Solutioning & Pre-Sales

●     Engage with customers, understand their business context, and guide them through a discovery and design process leading to a proposed solution

●     Work with sales teams to develop winning proposals, RFP responses, and technical presentations.

●     Will need to take single point ownership of the pre sales process, including client interactions, proposal preparation, presentations, pricing etc

●     Drive proof-of-concepts as part of the pre sales process

●     Build frameworks for different kinds of proposals and presentations to bring in repeatability and efficiency in the process

●     Work closely with marketing to create content around Indexnine offerings, solutions, capabilities and case studies

2. Delivery

●     Provide technical oversight during project delivery, ensuring adherence to architectural principles, standards, and best practices and ensure the as-sold solution is realised

●     Act as a trusted advisor to senior customer stakeholders (CXO level and technical leads). Will need to engage with Customers through delivery as required

●     Create points of view on accounts to help mine and grow accounts.

3. Practice & CoE Development

●     Work closely with the labs. Contribute to the development of new products/ accelerators.

●     Mentor and coach engineers to enhance their technical and customer engagement skills.

4. Thought leadership

●     Keep abreast of technology and produce points of view for Indexnine’s offerings and technical capabilities

●     Represent the company at industry forums, webinars, and client workshops.

●     Be able to independently conduct discovery and solutioning workshops with Customers

Skills/Qualifications:

●     15+ years of overall experience with a blend of architecting, pre sales and technical delivery

●     Should be leading a pre-sales unit in a services organization. Hands-on with designing solutions, proposal writing, estimation, pricing and customer presentations.

●     Broad based technical expertise and having played a Sr Architect role for at least 2 years

●     Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and team leadership skills.

●     Experience working in an IT services environment in the Product Engineering space (i.e designing and building bespoke products/solutions)

●     BE/ Masters degree

What you'll do

Own a client end to end. Learn their business, find what to automate or rebuild, and lead the work that ships it.

Turn business problems into technical solutions sit in the call, understand the real problem, design the fix, and decide how it gets built.

Stay hands-on. You'll still write code, build integrations, and work with APIs every day.

Build on whatever the client runs Zoho, Salesforce, Azure, similar platforms, and custom apps where needed.

Run delivery: scope it, sequence it, ship it, support it. The timeline is yours.

Review code and designs. Mentor the developers on your projects and unblock them fast.

Be the escalation point when something breaks or an integration misbehaves.

Own client communication on the technical side status, tradeoffs, bad news, early.

Keep the bar high: clear docs, clear updates, clear commit history.

What we're looking for

4–7 years shipping software, with real depth in REST APIs and system integrations.

Experience leading projects or small teams — the person others check with before they build.

Strong with business platforms (Zoho, Salesforce, or similar). Much of the leverage lives there, not in custom code.

You can sit with a non-technical client, understand the problem, and come back with a working solution.

Still enjoy building. This is technical leadership, not coordination.

Self-driven. You'll often be the senior-most engineer on the account.

Why you'll love this role

Full ownership from first call to delivery — you run projects, not a ticket queue.

Direct access to clients and leadership. Your decisions ship the same week.

Constant variety: new systems, new problems, new builds.

A step into technical leadership without giving up the hands-on work.

Understand client business requirements and translate them into technical solutions.

Conduct requirement gathering, analysis, solution design, and technical documentation.

Work closely with development, QA, infrastructure, and business teams throughout the project lifecycle.

Provide technical guidance and recommend suitable technologies, architectures, and solutions.

Participate in system integration, implementation, testing, deployment, and troubleshooting.

Analyze existing systems and identify opportunities for optimization and improvement.

Prepare technical specifications, solution documents, architecture diagrams, and project documentation.

Act as a technical point of contact for clients and internal stakeholders.

Identify technical risks, dependencies, and challenges and provide appropriate solutions.

Support pre-sales activities, including technical discussions, solution presentations, and proposal preparation when required.

Stay updated with emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices.

About the Company

As the world moves toward AI-native applications, one element matters more than anything: data.

We are building a platform that helps organizations unlock the value hidden within customer feedback. By centralizing data from multiple sources—including CRM platforms, support systems, collaboration tools, surveys, community forums, and customer conversations—into a unified intelligence layer, we enable teams to understand customer needs and make better product decisions.

Built on top of this foundation is an AI-powered platform that allows teams to query, monitor, and act on customer intelligence directly within their workflows. Our customers include some of the fastest-growing product-led technology companies as well as large global enterprises.

Backed by leading global venture capital firms, our engineering culture is AI-native from the ground up. Agents, LLMs, and applied machine learning are not side projects—they are central to how we build products. We operate at the cutting edge of agentic systems and continuously push the boundaries of what modern AI applications can achieve.

What You Will Do

• Convert product direction into phased technical plans, including estimates, milestones, dependencies, and risk assessments.
• Make thoughtful trade-offs across correctness, latency, user experience, AI/model behavior, reliability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Define clear ownership boundaries across frontend applications, BFF layers, backend services, agent workflows, ML platforms, and data contracts.
• Review ERDs, PRDs, design documents, and implementation plans to identify gaps before they become execution challenges.
• Drive planning and execution for complex initiatives while empowering area leads and senior engineers to maintain ownership.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and GTM teams to turn ambiguous problem statements into executable solutions.
• Influence technical direction through strong engineering judgment, architectural leadership, and hands-on involvement.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to engineering excellence through reviews, incident analysis, and proactive risk management.

What It Takes

• 5+ years of experience as a Senior Engineer, Technical Lead, or equivalent role.
• Demonstrated experience owning architecture and execution for large-scale product or platform initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems and modern software architecture.
• Exposure to agentic AI systems, machine learning engineering, MLOps platforms, and frontend/BFF architectures.
• Ability to own end-to-end product and technical problems rather than specializing exclusively in a single layer of the stack.
• Proven track record of converting ambiguity into actionable engineering plans.
• Excellent written communication skills, including design documentation, architectural reviews, trade-off analyses, and RCA documentation.
• Ability to challenge requirements constructively and collaborate effectively across Product, Design, Engineering, and GTM functions.
• High ownership mindset, attention to detail, and a low-ego, collaborative approach.

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

2

Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

3

Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

4

Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

5

Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

6

Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

7

Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

8

Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

9

Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

10

Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

11

Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

2

Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

3

Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

4

Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

5

Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

6

Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

7

Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

8

Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

9

Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

10

Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

11

Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college