Principal Architect

SOLANA FOUNDATION; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

KAST is seeking a seasoned Architecture Lead to own and drive the technical strategy for its global fintech platform. You will be the primary technical authority for system design, ensuring high-throughput engines and complex microservices remain resilient, secure, and performant under massive load.

You will partner with Engineering, Product, and Security leadership to set the standards for how we build, deploy, and evolve our transactional infrastructure on AWS. Location: London, Hybrid.

Qualifications

• 10+ years software engineering experience in fintech/financial infra.
• Strong distributed systems and microservices expertise.
• Experience designing for high-throughput, low-latency payment platforms.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive long-term architectural strategy for KAST.
• Lead design/review of distributed systems for reliability and scale on AWS.
• Architect critical paths including payment processing and ledger systems.
• Define architecture principles, CI/CD, and IaC deployment patterns.

Skills

Fintech leadership

Distributed systems

AWS expert

Data integrity

Security & compliance

Influencing

Job description

We re looking for a seasoned Architecture Lead to own and drive KAST s technical strategy as we scale our global fintech platform. You will be the primary technical authority for our system design, responsible for ensuring that our high-throughput transaction engines and complex microservices ecosystem remain resilient, performant, and secure under massive load.

You will partner with Engineering, Product, and Security leadership to bridge the gap between business growth and technical execution, setting the standards for how we build, deploy, and evolve our transactional infrastructure on AWS.

Location: flexible across Europe/APAC.

Department Engineering. Employment Type: Full Time. Location: London. Workplace type: Hybrid.

What You ll Be Doing

• Own the Architectural Vision: Define and drive the long-term technical architecture for KAST, ensuring our platform evolves to meet the demands of high-throughput transactional volume.
• Design for Scale & Reliability: Lead the design and review of our distributed systems, ensuring our microservices architecture is built for fault tolerance, high availability, and massive scalability on AWS.
• Optimize Transactional Flows: architect critical path systems, including our payment processing, ledger management, and financial data consistency models, ensuring sub-millisecond performance and auditability.
• Establish Engineering Standards: Define architecture principles, coding standards, and deployment patterns (CI/CD, IaC) that enable autonomous microservices teams to ship code safely and rapidly.
• Cloud-Native Strategy: Lead our AWS strategy, optimizing resource utilization, latency, and cost while leveraging managed services to improve developer velocity.
• Drive Security & Compliance: Integrate security-by-design principles into our architecture, ensuring that our transaction-heavy environment meets strict financial compliance standards (PCI-DSS, SOC2).
• Influence & Mentor: Act as a force multiplier for the engineering organization by mentoring senior engineers, leading architecture review boards, and guiding major technical decisions.

What You ll Bring

• Proven Fintech Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant track record architecting large-scale payment platforms, ledger systems, or high-volume financial infrastructure.
• Distributed Systems Expert: Deep expertise in microservices architecture, event-driven design, and the trade-offs inherent in building consistent, high-throughput distributed systems.
• Cloud-Native Proficiency: Extensive experience designing and operating complex, high-traffic applications on AWS.
• Data & Transaction Integrity: Strong understanding of database patterns for financial data, including transaction atomicity, consistency models, and handling distributed data across microservices.
• Strategic Influencer: Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams, manage stakeholder expectations, and drive consensus on complex architectural trade-offs.
• Security & Compliance Awareness: Knowledge of designing for security within a regulated industry, understanding how to protect sensitive financial data while maintaining system throughput.
• Growth Mindset: Ability to balance immediate delivery needs with long-term architectural debt management.

About KAST

KAST is redefining stablecoin banking for global citizens, crypto professionals, Web3-native businesses, and high-inflation markets hungry for USD-backed banking. Backed by top-tier global investors and led by the ex-APAC CEO of Circle, our leadership team spans Circle, Airwallex, Revolut, Wise, Grab, Zoom, AWS, and leading OTC desks. We ve scaled from zero to nearly a million users at ridiculous speed.