Chief Architect

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI); Bengaluru; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 5,500,000; Full time

Job summary

UIDAI is seeking a Chief Architect to oversee end-to-end technical architecture, set technology vision, establish standards, and guide teams to build secure, reliable, and scalable platforms at national scale.

The role leads enterprise, application, data, and security architectures, drives architectural runway, and partners with product, security, operations, and policy teams to deliver resilient solutions.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering
• 5+ years in architecture leadership
• Proven experience leading architectures serving 10M+ users and petabyte-scale data systems

Responsibilities

• Define a 3-5 year architecture strategy aligned to UIDAI's mission and goals.
• Publish a living reference architecture and target state.
• Maintain an architecture runway that de-risks next 2-3 quarters of delivery.
• Standardize patterns for microservices, APIs, eventing, workflow, and data pipelines.
• Drive multi-DC / multi-region resiliency (active-active/active-passive), capacity planning, disaster recovery RTO/RPO.
• Establish golden paths (service templates, libraries, infra modules) to accelerate teams.
• Own API standards, event schemas, and backward compatibility.
• Promote efficient designs for high-throughput transfers; codify performance SLOs per journey.
• Define data mesh/lakehouse principles, governance, lineage, and privacy controls.
• Standardize streaming (e.g., Kafka/Flink) and OLAP/observability stores; enable ML feature stores and online/offline parity.
• Security, Privacy & Compliance by Design
• Enforce secure coding, SBOM/SCA, secrets & key management, HSM/PKI usage, and privacy-preserving patterns (tokenization/SD-JWT VC where applicable).
• Embed threat modeling in design reviews; ensure regulatory compliance and auditability.
• DevEx & DevSecOps
• Institutionalise CI/CD, GitOps, IaC, progressive delivery, and automated quality gates.
• Champion observability standards (OTEL traces/logs/metrics), SLOs, and incident learning loops.
• Chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB); run lightweight RFC process; track decision records (ADRs).
• Measure and reduce tech debt; manage vendor/OSS risk and cost.
• Leadership & Stakeholder Management
• Mentor Staff/Principal engineers, and solution architects to ensure technology complexities are understood clearly.
• Partner with Product, Security, Operations, Legal/Policy, and external ecosystems/standards bodies.

Skills

System design

Architecture leadership

Mentoring

Multitier architectures

DevOps practices

Data analytics

AI/ML familiarity

Security

Full-stack

Job description

The Chief Architect oversees the end-to-end technical architecture of the UIDAI, setting the technology vision, establishing standards, and guiding teams to build secure, reliable, and cost-efficient platforms at a national scale. This role steers enterprise, application, data, and security architectures; ensures architectural runway for product/mission goals; and leads cross-functional engineering decisions (build/buy, patterns, and roadmap trade-offs). The Chief Architect ensures this foundation is secure, scalable, and sustainable—enabling innovation while upholding trust and compliance.

About the Role

The Chief Architect oversees the end-to-end technical architecture of the UIDAI, setting the technology vision, establishing standards, and guiding teams to build secure, reliable, and cost-efficient platforms at a national scale.

Responsibilities

• Define a 3-5 year architecture strategy aligned to UIDAI's mission statement and goals set out by the Authority;
• Publish a living reference architecture and target state.
• Maintain an architecture runway that de-risks next 2-3 quarters of delivery.
• Standardize patterns for microservices, APIs, eventing, workflow, and data pipelines.
• Drive multi-DC / multi-region resiliency (active-active/active-passive), capacity planning, disaster recovery RTO/RPO.
• Establish golden paths (service templates, libraries, infra modules) to accelerate teams.
• Own API standards, event schemas, and backward compatibility.
• Promote efficient designs for high-throughput transfers; codify performance SLOs per journey.
• Define data mesh/lakehouse principles, governance, lineage, and privacy controls.
• Standardize streaming (e.g., Kafka/Flink) and OLAP/observability stores; enable ML feature stores and online/offline parity.
• Security, Privacy & Compliance by Design
• Enforce secure coding, SBOM/SCA, secrets & key management, HSM/PKI usage, and privacy-preserving patterns (tokenization/SD-JWT VC where applicable).
• Embed threat modeling in design reviews; ensure regulatory compliance and auditability.
• DevEx & DevSecOps
• Institutionalise CI/CD, GitOps, IaC, progressive delivery, and automated quality gates.
• Champion observability standards (OTEL traces/logs/metrics), SLOs, and incident learning loops.
• Chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB); run lightweight RFC process; track decision records (ADRs).
• Measure and reduce tech debt; manage vendor/OSS risk and cost.
• Leadership & Stakeholder Management
• Mentor Staff/Principal engineers, and solution architects to ensure technology complexities are understood very clearly to implement solutions expeditiously with high quality.
• Partner with Product, Security, Operations, Legal/Policy, and external ecosystems/standards bodies.
• Engage and work with cross-functional leaders to understand and help define business principles, goals and strategy within the scope of responsibility.
• Communicate to senior leaders regarding strategy direction and changes.

Must have leading experience in large scale functional environment like Bank, Pharma, Telecom, Fintech, e-Commerce etc..

Should have multidiscipline experience in Backend, Data/AI, Security etc

Current role should be Chief/Senior/Principal Architect.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering with 5+ years in architecture leadership.
• Proven experience leading architectures serving 10M+ users and petabyte-scale data systems.

Required Skills

• Technical Breadth - Exposure to a wide variety of problem spaces, technologies.
• Very Strong System design and OO skills with a nifty ability to craft clean interfaces and operate at the right levels of abstraction.
• Solid coding skills with ability to drive teams through massive refactoring exercise & improve coding standards across large code bases.
• Good knowledge, understanding & experience of working with a large variety of multitier architectures. Awareness of pitfalls & use cases for a large variety of solutions.
• Good understanding & experience of high-performance web-scale & real-time response systems.
• Experience & exposure to a variety of large-scale persistent systems, including large databases.
• Exposure to complete product development cycles – From inception to production to scaling up, supporting new requirements, re-architectures - the Architects should have seen it all. Should have been part of scalable product development cycles.
• Excellent Mentoring skills – Be the technical mentor to the team.
• Must be comfortable working in fuzzy environments - where boundaries aren't clearly defined.
• Previous Distinguished/chief architect or senior tech leadership experience in tech-focused firms.
• Familiarity with data analytics, AI/ML, and DevOps practices.
• Strong technical foundation in software architecture and full-stack.

Preferred Skills

• Previous Distinguished/chief architect or senior tech leadership experience in tech-focused firms.