Principal Software Architect — Regulated Systems (Healthcare & Payments)

Techdome; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 4,200,000 - 6,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Techdome is seeking a senior architect‑level engineer to own the technical spine of an 80+ person studio building systems that handle real patient data and real money. You will design the architecture this quarter and be paged about it next quarter, write the patterns, and own the outcome from design review to post‑incident retro.

This role goes beyond diagrams: make trade‑offs, own production deployments, and ensure secure, scalable platforms while mentoring engineers across multiple regions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production ownership at architect, principal, or staff engineer level.
• Current Node.js and React experience; MERN preferred or strong Node‑centric full‑stack background.
• Cloud fluency with AWS, GCP or Azure; on‑call experience for built systems.
• Experience in regulated or high‑stakes domains (HIPAA/PHI, PCI‑DSS, fintech, banking, etc.).
• Ability to defend technical standards with concrete evidence and actual decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform architecture and set patterns across 80+ engineers.
• Design, implement and review production‑grade solutions; lead incident retros.
• Collaborate with clients and teams to drive hard architectural recommendations.
• Ensure compliance, security and cost optimization in production workloads.
• Mentor engineers and shape AI tooling strategy in production.

Skills

Production ownership

Node.js

React

MERN stack

Cloud infrastructure

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

The Job, Stated Plainly

Somewhere in your org there's an architecture doc nobody's opened since the kickoff meeting. This role doesn't produce those.

Techdome is hiring someone to own the technical spine of an 80+ engineer studio that builds systems handling real patient data and real money — not staging data, not a demo environment. The architecture you design this quarter is the architecture you're paged about next quarter. You'll sit in the design review, write the PR that sets the pattern, run the incident retro when something breaks at 2am, and sit across the table from the client who's trusting your judgment over their own instinct. Same person, all four rooms.

This isn't a diagramming job with an 'architect' title bolted on. If what draws you to architecture is the leverage of being right and present — not the authority of a title — this is written for you.

The Shape of the Work

You own the platform, not a slice of it.

The compliance load is real, not theoretical.

The stack is MERN, end to end, with the infrastructure that keeps it alive in production.

You make the trade‑off calls and you own what happens after.

Your patterns outlast your projects.

AI tooling is load‑bearing here, not a novelty.

You grow people without a reporting line to lean on.

Clients take the hard recommendation from you

What Gets You In the Room

• 7+ years of production ownership at architect, principal, or staff engineer level, with 2–3 years as the final technical authority on a platform — the person whose sign-off actually meant something, not one voice among several.
• You still write code. Real, current Node.js and React experience — MERN specifically is preferred, but a strong Node‑centric full‑stack background gets you a serious look too.
• Cloud fluency that comes from running things, not just drawing them — AWS, GCP, or Azure, with the networking, security, and cost‑optimization instincts you only get from being on call for what you built.
• A regulated or high‑stakes domain you've actually been burned by — HIPAA/PHI, PCI‑DSS, fintech, banking, insurance, or something comparably unforgiving.
• Trade‑offs you made and then had to live with — not hypotheticals, actual decisions with actual consequences you can walk someone through.
• The composure to hold a skeptical room — engineers who'll push back, clients who came in with a different plan — and bring them around with evidence instead of authority.

What Moves You to the Top of the Pile

• HIPAA experience that's actually been audited — BAA‑covered infrastructure, PHI access controls, audit trails that held up under scrutiny.
• Payment systems work with Stripe, Braintree, or similar — tokenization, reconciliation, life inside a PCI‑DSS environment.
• Event‑driven and microservices architecture at a scale where it actually mattered.
• Time spent in consulting, multi‑product, or venture‑studio settings, where you're solving the same class of problem for different clients back to back.
• A history of setting technical standards across teams or products — not just the one you happened to be closest to.
• Opinions on AI‑assisted development you're willing to defend in an argument, because you've actually built the practice, not just read about it.

What Success Looks Like at Six Months

You've shipped at least one architectural decision that other engineers now cite as precedent. You've run an incident retro that changed how the team builds, not just how it apologizes. A client has taken your recommendation over their original plan — and it worked out. Somewhere in the codebase, there's a pattern with your fingerprints on it that a new hire picks up without ever being told to.

Who Should Probably Skip This

If 'architect' means Visio diagrams and a handoff to someone else's implementation, this will frustrate you fast. If you'd rather not be the one explaining, at 2am, why the system did what it did — this is not your role. And if regulated‑industry constraints read to you as red tape rather than the actual point, you'll fight the job the whole way through.

Why Techdome

We're bootstrapped and profitable — no investor deck to perform for, no growth‑at‑all‑costs mandate distorting the architecture. 80+ engineers across Hyderabad, Indore, Mumbai, Dubai, and the US, and we take equity in what we build alongside our clients. That's not a perk line — it's why the people here still care about a system a year after launch. We don't get to walk away when the invoice clears, so we don't build like we will.