Application Architect

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI); Hyderabad, Mumbai; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 4,200,000; Full time

Job summary

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in Hyderabad is seeking an accomplished Application Architect to lead the design, governance, and evolution of enterprise-grade applications. The role requires hands-on full-stack expertise and deep knowledge of integration, high-throughput OLTP databases, and contemporary JavaScript frontends.

You will draft architectural blueprints, establish engineering standards, mentor development teams, and drive Architecture Decision Records.

Qualifications

• Mastery of GoF design patterns across Creational, Structural, Behavioral categories.
• Strong understanding of SOLID, DRY, KISS, YAGNI, and clean architecture.
• Experience designing large-scale distributed systems with high availability.
• Hands-on full-stack with modern JS frameworks and backend tech (Java/Spring, Node.js, Python).

Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end architecture for enterprise applications across presentation, business, integration, and data tiers.
• Enforce architectural standards and engineering guidelines across teams.
• Document architectural trade-offs, rationale, and ADRs.
• Mentor engineering staff through reviews, walkthroughs, and code reviews.
• Drive performance analysis and optimization of applications and databases.
• Collaborate with product, DevOps, security, and infra for cohesive delivery.

Skills

GoF patterns

SOLID principles

Distributed systems

JavaScript/TypeScript

React/Angular

REST APIs

Kubernetes

Docker

Event-driven

CQRS

Tools

Apache Kafka

RabbitMQ

Spring

React

Angular

Job description

The organization is seeking an accomplished Application Architect to assume technical leadership for the design, governance, and continuous evolution of enterprise-grade applications. The successful candidate shall be a hands-on full stack architect possessing deep proficiency in software engineering fundamentals, enterprise application integration, high-throughput OLTP database design, and contemporary JavaScript-based frontend architectures. The incumbent will be entrusted with the formulation of architectural blueprints, the establishment of engineering standards, and the technical mentorship of development teams in the delivery of scalable, resilient, and maintainable enterprise solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end architecture of enterprise applications spanning presentation, business, integration, and data tiers.
• Accountable for ensuring application designs and implementations remain structurally sound under scale, failure, and change, and for identifying, calling out, and correcting architectural deviations early.
• Establish, document, and enforce architectural standards, engineering guidelines, and best practices across all development teams.
• Make and document architectural trade‑offs across performance, simplicity, operability, and long‑term evolution, with clear articulation of rationale and consequences.
• Lead the appropriate application of design patterns and enterprise integration patterns in the resolution of complex business problems.
• Architect scalable, fault‑tolerant, and high-performance distributed systems aligned with organizational objectives.
• Ensure application behaviour remains predictable at runtime by evaluating concurrency models, integration choices, failure scenarios, and recovery pathsnot just static designs or diagrams.
• Drive technology evaluations, proof‑of‑concept initiatives, and the formal documentation of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Collaborate extensively with product management, business stakeholders, DevOps, security, and infrastructure teams to ensure cohesive solution delivery.
• Provide technical mentorship to engineering staff through architecture reviews, design walkthroughs, and structured code reviews.
• Conduct ongoing performance analysis and optimization of applications, database systems, and overall system throughput.
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies and continually refine the organization's architectural roadmap accordingly.

Required Technical Competencies

Design Patterns and Software Architecture

• Demonstrated and comprehensive mastery of the Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns, encompassing Creational, Structural, and Behavioral categories.
• Proven ability to apply patterns judiciously, including but not limited to Factory, Strategy, Observer, Decorator, Adapter, Proxy, Command, and Chain of Responsibility, in the context of real‑world enterprise problems.
• Thorough understanding of SOLID principles, along with DRY, KISS, YAGNI, and clean architecture methodologies.
• Substantive experience with architectural styles including layered, hexagonal, microservices, event‑driven, and CQRS architectures.

System Design

• Demonstrated expertise in the design of large‑scale, distributed, and highly available systems.
• Comprehensive understanding of scalability principles, load balancing strategies, caching mechanisms, sharding, replication, and the CAP theorem.
• Substantive experience with API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and asynchronous communication paradigms, including message queues and event streaming platforms.
• Demonstrated capability in capacity planning, architectural trade‑off analysis, and the engineering of non‑functional requirements pertaining to performance, security, and availability.

Application Integration and Enterprise Integration Patterns

• Practical experience with messaging patterns including Message Channel, Message Router, Content‑Based Router, Aggregator, Splitter, Scatter‑Gather, and Saga.
• Demonstrated familiarity with enterprise integration platforms and middleware solutions such as Apache Camel, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and ActiveMQ.
• Experience with B2B and legacy integration standards including SOAP/WSDL, XML/XSLT transformations.
• Sound understanding of reliability semantics in integration design, including idempotency, retry strategies with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, dead‑letter queues, poison‑message handling, and at‑least‑once versus exactly‑once delivery guarantees.
• Proficiency in data transformation, canonical data model design, schema registry usage (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema), and contract‑first integration approaches.
• Proven track record in the design of reliable, loosely coupled integrations across heterogeneous enterprise systems.

Operating Systems, Data Structures, and Algorithms

• Robust foundational knowledge of operating system concepts, including processes and threads, scheduling, memory management, file systems, inter‑process communication, and virtualization.
• Comprehensive command of data structures (arrays, linked lists, trees, graphs, hash tables, heaps) and core algorithms (sorting,searching, dynamic programming, and graph traversal).
• Demonstrated ability to perform asymptotic analysis (Big‑O notation) and to select optimal solutions in accordance with given constraints.
• Working knowledge of concurrency primitives, including locks, semaphores, monitors, atomic operations, and memory models.

Structured Concurrency and Reactive Programming

• Substantive experience with structured concurrency models, including Java Project Loom virtual threads, Kotlin coroutines, and structured task scopes.
• Comprehensive understanding of reactive programming principles, encompassing backpressure handling, non‑blocking input/output, and event‑driven stream processing.
• Practical experience with reactive frameworks such as Project Reactor, RxJava, RxJS, or Spring WebFlux.
• Demonstrated capability in the design of responsive, resilient, elastic, and message‑driven systems in accordance with the principles set forth in the Reactive Manifesto.

Full‑Stack Development and Architecture

• Comprehensive command of JavaScript fundamentals, including closures, prototypes, the event loop, asynchronous programming (async/await and Promises), modules, and ES6 and subsequent language features.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript, including advanced type system features, generics, and the application of strict typing within large enterprise codebases.
• Substantive hands‑on experience delivering production‑grade applications using either ReactJS (including hooks, context, and state management libraries) or AngularJS; expertise in both shall be considered an advantage.
• Proficiency in HTML5, CSS3, responsive design methodologies, and contemporary frontend tooling such as Webpack, Vite, esbuild, and modern package managers.
• Familiarity with frontend build and deployment architecture, including bundling strategy, CDN distribution, and cache invalidation mechanisms.
• Demonstrated backend competency in at least one major enterprise ecosystem, including Java/Spring, Node.js, .NET, or Python.
• Solid understanding of containerization technologies (Docker), orchestration platforms (Kubernetes), and continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
• Strong foundational understanding of relational database architecture, including schema design, indexing strategy, transaction boundaries, and isolation levels.
• Demonstrated ability to design application data models and access patterns that remain correct under concurrency, retries, partial failures, and autoscaling.
• Clear understanding of OLTP system characteristics and the architectural distinction between transactional and analytical workloads.
• Working expertise with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and PL/SQL sufficient to evaluate schema design, query patterns, and transactional safety.
• Ability to assess and govern concurrency control mechanisms, including optimistic versus pessimistic locking and MVCC, from an application behavior perspective.
• Experience designing applications that use connection pools, transactions, and retries safely and predictably.
• Understanding of highavailability data patterns (replication, failover, read/write separation) insofar as they impact application correctness and behavior.
• Familiarity with NoSQL and cachebased stores applied selectively as part of a broader persistence strategy, not as default replacements.