Senior Software Architect & Tech Lead

Manulife; Kuala Lumpur; Hybrid; MYR 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Manulife is seeking an experienced Solution Architect to lead end-to-end design of digital applications and platform enhancements. You will mentor a small engineering team, drive secure, compliant architecture, and coordinate multi-team delivery across front-end, back-end, and integrations.

You will champion AI-assisted development, oversee CI/CD, and ensure quality through robust reviews and testing. Hybrid work model with global collaboration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, or a related discipline.
• Minimum 5-8 years of relevant software development experience across front-end, back-end, integration, and database technologies.
• Proven experience in solution design, system architecture, technical documentation, and evaluation of solution options.
• Demonstrated experience leading and guiding 3-5 team members in IT project delivery.
• Experience delivering enterprise applications using Agile or iterative delivery methods.
• Experience coordinating technical delivery across business, engineering, quality, security, infrastructure, and operational stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical topics to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end solution design for digital applications, integrations, APIs, and platform enhancements.
• Translate business and functional requirements into scalable, secure, maintainable, and cost-effective technical solutions.
• Develop and maintain solution architecture documents, system context and integration flows, API specifications, data models, and detailed technical designs.
• Evaluate technical options, identify trade-offs, and recommend solution approaches aligned with enterprise standards and business outcomes.
• Ensure solutions comply with enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, data protection, regulatory, resilience, and technology governance requirements.
• Facilitate technical design reviews and architecture walkthroughs with relevant stakeholders.
• Lead, guide, and mentor a team of 3-5 software engineers throughout the project delivery lifecycle.
• Provide technical direction, coaching, development support, and timely resolution of engineering blockers.
• Allocate technical work based on delivery priorities, team capacity, skills, and project dependencies.
• Conduct peer reviews, code reviews, design reviews, and quality checks to maintain engineering standards.
• Promote accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and engineering discipline.
• Develop team capability through mentoring, technical workshops, reusable engineering assets, and succession planning.
• Lead technical delivery from requirements analysis and solution design through development, testing, deployment, and production stabilization.
• Plan and coordinate engineering activities to meet agreed scope, schedule, quality, security, and business objectives.
• Manage multiple projects, enhancements, defects, and technical workstreams while maintaining delivery transparency.
• Identify and proactively manage technical risks, dependencies, resource constraints, delivery issues, and technical debt.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Business Analysts, Architects, Quality Engineers, Infrastructure, Security, Operations, vendors, and business stakeholders.
• Provide clear progress updates, technical recommendations, risk assessments, and escalation support to project and technology leadership.
• Support release planning, implementation, rollback readiness, post-release validation, and production stabilization.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain secure enterprise web applications across front-end and back-end components.
• Build responsive user interfaces using Angular, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, or comparable technologies.
• Develop backend services, RESTful APIs, integrations, and business logic using Java, Spring Boot, or equivalent technologies.
• Design and optimize databases, queries, data models, and integration patterns.
• Develop reusable components and services that improve maintainability, consistency, performance, and delivery speed.
• Troubleshoot complex application, integration, performance, and production issues and lead root-cause analysis.
• Champion the responsible use of approved AI-powered tools, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, or equivalent enterprise platforms, to improve engineering productivity and software quality.
• Apply AI assistance to solution exploration, coding, refactoring, documentation, test generation, troubleshooting, and defect analysis.
• Establish practical team guidance for reviewing, testing, and validating AI-generated outputs before implementation.
• Ensure AI-assisted engineering complies with secure coding, data protection, intellectual property, privacy, and Responsible AI requirements.
• Drive AI-assisted and automated testing practices covering unit, integration, API, regression, and selected end-to-end scenarios.
• Improve test coverage and reusable test assets through tools such as Katalon, Selenium, Playwright, Postman, or equivalent frameworks
• Support CI/CD pipeline implementation, automated quality gates, and reliable deployment practices.
• Apply secure coding, DevSecOps, vulnerability management, logging, monitoring, and operational readiness practices.
• Ensure adherence to SDLC, code review, testing, release management, change management, audit, and compliance controls.
• Maintain technical documentation, deployment guides, support runbooks, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering processes, platform reliability, development efficiency, and technical debt management.

Skills

Solution design

Architecture

Technical leadership

Team mentoring

Code reviews

DevOps

Security best practices

Stakeholder communication

Agile delivery

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, or a related discipline

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Angular

React

TypeScript

Postman

Selenium

Playwright

Job description

Manulife is seeking an experienced Solution Architect to lead end-to-end design of digital applications and platform enhancements. You will mentor a small engineering team, drive secure, compliant architecture, and coordinate multi-team delivery across front-end, back-end, and integrations.

You will champion AI-assisted development, oversee CI/CD, and ensure quality through robust reviews and testing. Hybrid work model with global collaboration.