Principal, Platform Architecture

OCC • Chicago, IL

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

OCC’s Platform Architecture team is responsible for the infrastructure, cloud, networking, compute, storage, and observability tooling that critical market functions depend on. The Principal, Platform Architecture is a senior individual contributor who defines the technical direction for OCC’s core platform capabilities — owning how we build, deploy, operate, and evolve the infrastructure layer across both legacy and cloud-native environments. This is a hands-on architecture role with enterprise-wide impact. You will lead POC efforts, drive platform standards adoption, and serve as the senior technical voice on platform concerns across programs including the Renaissance/Ovation transformation. You will work closely with Application Architecture, Engineering, Security, and operations teams to ensure the platform is a resilient, scalable foundation — not a bottleneck.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture roles with demonstrated ownership of enterprise-scale platform decisions
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes — cluster architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operational patterns at scale
• Hands-on experience architecting Apache Kafka deployments — topic design, partitioning strategy, consumer group patterns, schema management, and operational concerns
• Practical experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks — job design, state management, and deployment on Kubernetes
• Strong AWS architecture experience — VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, networking, and security services
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing GitOps pipelines — infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, secrets management, and release automation using tools such as Flux, ArgoCD, Terraform, or Helm
• Experience with brownfield/legacy environments alongside cloud-native programs
• Ability to produce clear, comprehensive architecture artifacts: diagrams, ADRs, reference architectures, and transition plans
• Strong communication skills — able to present platform decisions to executive audiences and work through technical trade-offs with engineering teams
• Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed)
• Kafka
• Apache Flink
• AWS foundational services: EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch
• GitOps tooling: ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform, Helm
• CI/CD pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
• Unix/Linux environments; container and image management (Docker, Nexus/Artifactory)
• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial services, particularly regulated environments (SIFMU, clearinghouse, exchange, or bank)
• Familiarity with Regulation SCI, CPMI-IOSCO resilience requirements, or equivalent financial market infrastructure regulatory frameworks
• Experience with observability tooling at scale — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
• Familiarity with high-performance and low-latency computing patterns relevant to risk and clearing workloads
• Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF
• AWS Solutions Architect — Associate or Professional (preferred)

Responsibilities

• Define and Own Platform Architecture
• Lead architecture design and decision-making for OCC’s core platform capabilities: container orchestration, streaming infrastructure, cloud architecture, CI/CD and GitOps pipelines, and observability
• Develop and maintain target-state platform architectures with clear transition plans from current state
• Own reference architectures for Kubernetes-based workloads, Kafka streaming topologies, Flink stream processing, and AWS infrastructure patterns
• Establish platform architecture standards and guardrails that application teams can build against reliably
• Ensure non-functional requirements — availability, latency, throughput, recoverability — are addressed at the platform level, not delegated to individual application teams
• Drive Platform Modernization
• Architect and guide migration of workloads to cloud-native patterns on AWS, including compute, networking, storage, and security services
• Define OCC’s GitOps model — infrastructure-as-code practices, pipeline standards, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale
• Evaluate and recommend platform technologies and tooling; lead proof-of-concept efforts to validate architectural decisions before commitment
• Identify and reduce platform risk across the portfolio — single points of failure, unsupported dependencies, capacity constraints, and operational gaps
• Collaborate and Influence
• Partner with Application Architecture to ensure platform capabilities match application design requirements — particularly for high-throughput, low-latency clearing workloads
• Engage Engineering and operations teams to ensure platform designs are buildable, operable, and supportable — not just theoretically sound
• Facilitate architecture working sessions with technical leads and business stakeholders; communicate platform decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Raise the Bar on Resilience and Operability
• Establish observability standards — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — as a platform-level capability, not an afterthought
• Define capacity planning and performance engineering practices for platform infrastructure
• Participate in incident reviews and post-mortems; translate operational findings into durable platform architecture improvements
• Ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC’s regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

Benefits

• A highly collaborative and supportive environment developed to encourage work-life balance and employee wellness.
• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees