Director of Technology & Chief Architect

High 5 Games•Mahwah, NJ

About The Position

High 5 Games is hiring a Director of Technology who is first and foremost a hands-on chief architect. You will shape the technical vision and grow into owning the architecture of a cloud platform built on hundreds of Java microservices that process millions of real-time transactions every day. You will join a mature, high-volume platform that is already running in production. You'll spend your first 90 days learning it deeply, embedded with the teams that built it, and take ownership of its architecture domain by domain: starting with the data and transaction layer, then service architecture and the cloud platform. By the end of your first year, you'll own the platform's architecture end to end and set its direction for the years ahead. This is not a slide-deck architect role. You will design systems, review code and schemas, set engineering standards, and lead the engineering and technology teams that build and run the platform. You must be comfortable explaining technology strategy and trade-offs to executives, business partners, and regulators. The platform you will own includes hundreds of microservices, primarily Java, running in the cloud, processing millions of real-time transactions per day where latency, consistency, and auditability matter on every one. It handles regulated, money-adjacent workloads for social and sweepstakes casino gaming, including wallets, purchases, game outcomes, and promotions, requiring 24x7 availability for players across web and mobile.

Requirements

12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years as an architect of large distributed systems.
Expert-level Java (Java 17+), with deep knowledge of Spring Boot / Spring Cloud, concurrency, and JVM performance tuning and garbage collection.
Proven track record designing and operating a microservices estate of 100+ services in production.
Hands-on experience with systems handling millions of real-time transactions per day, with measurable latency and uptime targets.
Deep database expertise: relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle) including query tuning, indexing, sharding, and replication, plus NoSQL and caching (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis).
Event-driven architecture with Kafka or a comparable streaming platform.
Production experience on AWS or GCP, with Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar).
Strong grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency models, idempotency, partitioning, backpressure, and failure modes.
Experience with API design (REST, gRPC), API gateways, and service mesh concepts.
Observability and reliability practice: Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog or similar; SLOs and incident management.
Experience leading and growing engineering teams, and evaluating and interviewing technical candidates.
Clear communicator with executives, peers, and individual contributors.

Nice To Haves

Background in gaming, iGaming, sweepstakes/social casino, sports betting, fintech, or payments.
Experience with wallet, ledger, or payment systems where every transaction must reconcile.
Familiarity with gaming regulatory, PCI DSS, or SOC 2 compliance requirements.
Led a migration or re-platforming of a monolith or legacy services to microservices with no downtime.
Experience with reactive or non-blocking Java (WebFlux, Vert.x, Netty) for high-throughput services.
Cloud cost optimization (FinOps) at scale.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Take ownership of the microservices platform's architecture, domain by domain, through the first year, and then own it end to end: service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and inter-service communication.
Design for high-volume, low-latency, real-time transaction processing with strong consistency and idempotency guarantees.
Define patterns for distributed transactions (sagas, outbox, event sourcing where appropriate), retries, and failure recovery.
Lead architecture reviews and keep a living record of decisions (ADRs) across hundreds of services.
Identify and pay down architectural debt; plan the evolution of legacy services without disrupting live traffic.
Set Java engineering standards: frameworks, libraries, build tooling, coding practices, and JVM tuning.
Own the database strategy across relational, NoSQL, caching, and streaming platforms, including schema design, partitioning, replication, and capacity.
Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks across the JVM, the network, and the data layer.
Guide the cloud architecture: containers, Kubernetes, managed data services, networking, and infrastructure as code.
Set SLOs, observability standards (metrics, tracing, logging), and incident response practices.
Drive scalability, resilience, disaster recovery, and cloud cost efficiency.
Ensure security, data protection, and auditability meet gaming regulatory and payment requirements.
Build, lead, and mentor the engineering and technology teams; raise the bar on hiring.
Translate business goals into a technology roadmap and project plans.
Manage technical vendors and third-party platforms.
Evaluate new technology and tools and bring in what moves the platform forward.
Communicate technology strategy and risk clearly to the CEO, executives, and partners.