Solutions Architect

ExcelGens, Inc.; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

ExcelGens, Inc. seeks a seasoned Solutions Architect in Toronto to lead hands-on architecture and delivery of enterprise-grade solutions. You will partner with product, platform, and developers to shape end-to-end designs, enforce quality, and guide a disciplined engineering approach.

You will drive AWS-based, serverless and microservice patterns, mentor teams, and ensure scalable, secure, observable production systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience with at least 3+ years focused on Node.js.
• Solution architecture experience across API design, data persistence, cloud services, and production support.
• 3+ years of Financial Services experience and understanding of Retail Banking complexities.
• Ability to explain architecture options, risks, and delivery impacts to diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead large teams through complex delivery lifecycles, mentoring and removing blockers.
• Own end-to-end solution design from business requirements to architecture and deployment.
• Manage senior stakeholders, set expectations, and ensure delivery success.
• Ensure high-quality output via code reviews and pattern-driven thinking.
• Provide hands-on architecture leadership with Node.js, security, and nonfunctional decisions.
• Design and maintain high-performance Node.js backends on AWS, including lambdas and APIs.

Skills

Leadership

Senior Stakeholder Management

Mentorship

Architecture leadership

Tools

Node.js

AWS Lambda

API Gateway

SQS

SNS

DynamoDB

CloudWatch

IAM

CI/CD

GraphQL

REST

Express.js

NestJS

Docker

ECS/Fargate

Terraform

CloudFormation

AWS SAM

Git

Jest

Mocha

Kubernetes

Job description

Role: Solutions Architect

Duration: 1 Year

Location & work model: Toronto, ON - Hybrid (2-3 times per week onsite

Project Background:

• This role combines hands-on technical leadership with solution architecture accountability. The successful candidate will work directly with developers, lead developers, product stakeholders, and platform teams to shape end-to-end solutions, validate design choices, troubleshoot complex delivery issues, and make practical engineering decisions that balance speed, quality, scalability, resilience, and enterprise standards.

Key Responsibilities:

• Leadership: Has led large highly performant teams through complex technical delivery lifecycle. Demonstrated capability to mentor, unblock and drive client requirement completion
• End-to-end solution design: Own and guide solution design from business requirement through application architecture, API contracts, data flows, integration patterns, deployment model, observability, operational support, and production readiness.
• Senior Stakeholder Management: Demonstrated ability to manage senior stakeholders, set expectations and be fully accountable for delivery success
• Ensure quality of output: Ensure highest quality and consistent code output from the team, performs code reviews and thinks from a pattern-oriented manner. Ability to step back and understand the business implications of the entire codebase or feature
• Hands-on architecture leadership: Work alongside lead developers to make code design, framework, integration, error handling, security, data modelling, and non-functional requirement decisions during delivery rather than only producing high-level design documents.
• Backend Development: Design, develop, review, and maintain high-performance Node.js applications and microservices on AWS infrastructure
• AWS Solution Architecture: Design, justify, and implement serverless and event-driven solutions using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, IAM, and CI/CD pipeline patterns, ensuring the architecture is scalable, resilient, secure, observable, and supportable in production.
• API Integration: Lead the design and implementation of API-level integrations between services, systems, and third-party platforms with a focus on scalability and reliability
• Event-Driven Systems: Build event-driven architectures leveraging SNS for publish-subscribe patterns and SQS for asynchronous message processing
• Database Design: Design and optimize DynamoDB schemas for high-performance applications, including effective partitioning and index strategies
• Code and design quality: Define coding standards, review critical implementation choices, enforce reusable patterns, challenge unnecessary complexity, and ensure the codebase aligns with the approved solution design, security expectations, test strategy, and long-term maintainability goals.
• Performance Optimization: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimize Lambda execution, and reduce costs through efficient resource utilization
• Technical troubleshooting: Lead investigation and resolution of complex design, integration, performance, deployment, and production issues by reading logs, reviewing code, tracing event flows, isolating root causes, and making clear remediation decisions with the development team.
• Pipeline and environment design: Partner with DevOps engineers to define CI/CD pipeline configurations, deployment gates, infrastructure-as-code structure, environment promotion strategy, monitoring, logging, rollback approach, and release readiness controls.
• Documentation: Create comprehensive technical documentation for APIs, architecture decisions, and operational procedures.
• Mentorship: Guide and mentor junior developers on AWS best practices and Node.js development patterns.

Required Qualifications:

• Experience Level: 8+ years of professional software development experience with at least 3+ years focused on Node.js
• Solution architecture experience: Proven experience designing end-to-end solutions across application architecture, API design, integration patterns, data persistence, cloud services, security controls, observability, deployment pipelines, and production support.
• Industry Experience: 3+ years of working in Financial Services and have an understanding of Retail Banking and complexities to operate within a large organization
• Architecture communication: Ability to explain architecture options, trade-offs, risks, assumptions, sequencing, and delivery impacts to senior stakeholders, product owners, developers, platform teams, and governance reviewers.
• Node.js Expertise: Strong proficiency in Node.js with production experience in Express.js, NestJS, or similar frameworks
• AI SDLC: Advocate and possess an expert ability to prompt tools for development efficiency, these tools include GitHub CoPilot and Claude Code. Ability to design reusable capabilities and leverage enterprise tooling for efficiency. Ideate and be able to present business benefits in an executive manner to justify business case
• AWS Proficiency: Demonstrated expertise with the following AWS services:
• AWS Lambda: Building and optimizing serverless functions, understanding cold starts, and managing execution context
• API Gateway: Designing RESTful and HTTP APIs, implementing authentication/authorization, rate limiting, and API versioning
• SQS (Simple Queue Service): Implementing asynchronous message processing, dead-letter queues (DLQ), and batch processing
• SNS (Simple Notification Service): Building publish-subscribe architectures, topic management, and message filtering
• DynamoDB: Table design, indexing strategies, query optimization, TTL management, and stream processing
• API Integration: Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and consuming APIs at scale with proficiency in REST architectural patterns, GraphQL (preferred), and API security
• Database Design: Strong understanding of NoSQL database concepts and experience with DynamoDB or similar document/key-value stores
• Asynchronous Programming: Deep knowledge of asynchronous patterns, callbacks, promises, async/await, and event-driven programming
• Version Control: Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows
• Testing: Experience with unit testing, integration testing, and test frameworks (Jest, Mocha, etc.)

Skills and Attributes for success:

• AWS Certifications: AWS Certified Developer Associate or Solutions Architect certification
• TypeScript: Experience developing with TypeScript for type-safe applications
• Container Technologies: Docker and ECS/Fargate experience for containerized deployments
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience with CloudFormation, AWS SAM, or Terraform
• Monitoring & Logging: Proficiency with CloudWatch, X-Ray, and logging solutions
• RabbitMQ/Kafka: Experience with additional message queuing platforms
• GraphQL: Implementation and optimization of GraphQL APIs
• Agile Methodologies: Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments
• Open Source Contributions: Active participation in Node.js or AWS-related open-source projects
• Multi-Region Deployments: Experience with globally distributed systems and disaster recovery