System Design Architect

Xgrid.co; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology services company is seeking a System Design Architect to lead architecture and design for scalable workflow platforms. You will drive architectural engagements, define patterns, and mentor teams. The ideal candidate has over 8 years of experience in software architecture and a strong understanding of distributed systems. This role is pivotal in ensuring robust and maintainable solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software architecture, backend design, or distributed systems.
• Proven experience designing microservice-based or event-driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of scalability, reliability, consistency models, and system resiliency.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end system design and architecture for workflow and automation platforms across client engagements.
• Design and implement distributed, event-driven systems with high scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Define architecture blueprints, reference implementations, and best practices for workflow orchestration.

Skills

Software architecture

Backend design

Distributed systems

Microservice-based architectures

Event-driven architectures

Messaging systems

Asynchronous communication

Cloud-native infrastructure

API design

Workflow modeling

Tools

Go

Java

Python

TypeScript

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

We are seeking a System Design Architect to lead the architecture, design, and evolution of modern, scalable, and resilient workflow platforms for our clients.

As a trusted technology partner for several enterprise clients, we help organizations design distributed systems that are fault-tolerant, event-driven, and cloud-native. You’ll play a key role in driving these architectural engagements — defining patterns, mentoring teams, and ensuring solutions are robust and maintainable at scale.

While direct experience with specific workflow orchestration technologies is a strong advantage, we value system design expertise, distributed systems fundamentals, and rapid learning ability above all.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end system design and architecture for workflow and automation platforms across client engagements.
• Design and implement distributed, event-driven systems with high scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Define architecture blueprints, reference implementations, and best practices for workflow orchestration and stateful service design.
• Collaborate with client engineering teams to evaluate, onboard, and scale workflow solutions.
• Guide decisions around data consistency, reliability patterns (sagas, retries, compensation), and observability.
• Conduct architecture reviews and provide technical governance across multiple concurrent projects.
• Partner with internal solution teams to establish accelerators, templates, and frameworks for rapid client adoption.
• Mentor engineers and provide architectural leadership within the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software architecture, backend design, or distributed systems.
• Proven experience designing microservice-based or event-driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of scalability, reliability, consistency models, and system resiliency.
• Proficiency in one or more languages such as Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of messaging, streaming, and asynchronous communication (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub).
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, Observability).
• Solid background in API design, workflow modeling, or automation systems.

Nice to Have (Highly Advantageous)

• Experience with workflow orchestration platforms or stateful orchestration frameworks (e.g., Temporal, Cadence, Airflow, Step Functions).
• Understanding of orchestration vs. choreography, activity/task design, and failure handling patterns.
• Experience running or optimizing workflow or event-processing clusters in production environments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes operators, service meshes, and observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).