Principal Architect - Distributed Systems & Event Streaming

Principal Architect – Distributed Systems & Event Streaming

Location: United Kingdom (Hybrid/Remote)

Reports to: CTO, UST FinX

Shape the Future of Banking Technology

At UST FinX , we're helping banks modernize legacy core systems through API-first, event-driven architectures. Rather than replacing critical banking platforms, we enable financial institutions to evolve incrementally, accelerating innovation while reducing risk.

We're looking for a Principal Architect – Distributed Systems & Event Streaming to lead the technical direction of our event-driven platform and distributed systems architecture.

This is a hands-on architecture role for someone who enjoys building, coding, mentoring, and solving complex production challenges at scale.

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the event-driven architecture strategy across the UST FinX platform.
• Design scalable, resilient distributed systems and streaming architectures.
• Establish standards for event contracts, schema governance, resiliency, observability, and platform engineering.
• Build reusable frameworks and patterns for high-throughput, real-time processing.
• Guide engineering teams on Kafka, event streaming, distributed systems, and platform best practices.
• Investigate and solve complex production challenges involving scalability, latency, resilience, ordering, and reliability.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects across globally distributed teams.
• Partner directly with the CTO to raise engineering standards and shape the future of the platform.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, distributed systems, or architecture.
• Deep expertise with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts including scalability, consistency, fault tolerance, retries, idempotency, and observability.
• Proven experience building and operating production-scale distributed platforms.
• Strong hands-on development background in Java and Spring Boot .
• Experience with schema governance, event contracts, versioning, and streaming platform operations.
• Passion for mentoring teams and driving engineering excellence.

Bonus Points For

• Experience within Banking, Payments, Lending, Wealth Management, or Financial Services.
• Knowledge of event sourcing, CDC, transactional outbox, and real-time stream processing.
• Cloud-native platform and container orchestration experience.
• Expertise in observability, tracing, and platform reliability engineering.

Why Join UST FinX?

✅ Report directly to the CTO and influence platform-wide architecture

✅ Build technology that powers the next generation of banking transformation

✅ Solve large-scale distributed systems challenges in a highly modern engineering environment

✅ Work with talented global engineering teams across architecture, platform, and product engineering

✅ Remain hands-on while driving strategy and technical direction

If you're passionate about event-driven systems, distributed architecture, and building scalable platforms that redefine banking technology, we'd love to hear from you.