Principal Architect: Event-Driven Systems & Streaming

UST; Nottingham; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

UST FinX seeks a Principal Architect to lead the technical direction of its event-driven architecture and distributed systems. This senior, hands-on engineering leadership role emphasizes building scalable, production-grade systems with Kafka/Redpanda, event contracts, schema management, and observability.

You will own architecture across platforms, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure secure, observable, and production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, or architecture.
• Proven ownership of large-scale, production distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Kafka, Redpanda, or comparable event-streaming platforms.
• Strong experience designing and operating event-driven architectures in enterprise environments.
• Expert-level Java engineering skills.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems design.
• Consistency models, ordering and idempotency.
• Concurrency, backpressure, throughput and latency optimisation.
• Replication, partitioning and failure recovery.
• Experience with retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, dead-letter queues, replay, rate limiting and graceful degradation patterns.
• Excellent communication and mentoring capability across globally distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the event-driven architecture strategy for UST FinX.
• Lead architecture across distributed systems, event streaming, integration, orchestration, and real-time processing services.
• Build reusable frameworks, libraries, and reference implementations for producers, consumers, retries, replay, resilience, and observability.
• Establish standards for event contracts, schema evolution, compatibility, governance, and lifecycle management.
• Guide teams on Kafka/Redpanda architecture, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, throughput, replay, ordering, and failure handling.
• Apply event sourcing, CQRS, asynchronous communication, and eventual consistency where they provide business value.
• Remain hands-on with Java, distributed systems, messaging infrastructure, and platform engineering.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues involving latency, ordering, consumer lag, duplication, retries, serialization, and distributed state.
• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, code reviews, and incident analysis.
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Platform, Data, DevOps, QA, and Delivery teams to ensure systems are secure, scalable, observable, and production-ready.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Event-driven architecture

Kafka/Redpanda

Tools

Kafka

Redpanda

Job description

UST FinX seeks a Principal Architect to lead the technical direction of its event-driven architecture and distributed systems. This senior, hands-on engineering leadership role emphasizes building scalable, production-grade systems with Kafka/Redpanda, event contracts, schema management, and observability.

You will own architecture across platforms, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure secure, observable, and production-ready solutions.