Senior Platform Architect: Cloud-Native, Kubernetes & Kafka

The Options Clearing Corporation; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 179,000 - 289,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work up to 2 days

Tuition reimbursement

Student loan repayment assistance

Technology stipend

Generous PTO & parental leave

401k employer match

Health benefits

Job summary

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) seeks a senior Principal, Platform Architecture to set the technical direction for the core platform. You will own how we build, deploy, operate, and evolve our infrastructure across legacy and cloud-native environments.

This hands-on role has enterprise-wide impact: you will lead POC efforts, drive standards adoption, and coordinate with Architecture, Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure a resilient, scalable platform that enables

Qualifications

• 10+ years in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture with enterprise scope.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise at cluster, networking, security, and scale.
• Hands-on Kafka deployments: topics, partitions, consumer groups, schema mgmt.
• Experience with Flink or similar stream processing frameworks.
• Strong AWS design skills across VPC, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS.
• Proven GitOps experience: IaC, environment promotion, secrets management, release automation.

Responsibilities

• Define and own platform architectures for core capabilities (Kubernetes, Kafka, streaming).
• Lead POC efforts, set platform standards, and drive modernization across programs.
• Collaborate with Application Architecture, Engineering, Security, and Ops teams.
• Develop reference architectures and transition plans with clear documentation.
• Ensure resilience, observability, and regulatory alignment at platform level.

Skills

Kubernetes

Apache Kafka

Apache Flink

AWS architecture

GitOps tooling

Education

BS degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Flux

ArgoCD

Terraform

Helm

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Docker/Nexus

Job description

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) seeks a senior Principal, Platform Architecture to set the technical direction for the core platform. You will own how we build, deploy, operate, and evolve our infrastructure across legacy and cloud-native environments.

This hands-on role has enterprise-wide impact: you will lead POC efforts, drive standards adoption, and coordinate with Architecture, Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure a resilient, scalable platform that enables