Staff Architect

Spreedly

30d

About The Position

The Staff Architect is a senior engineering leader responsible for designing, evolving, and governing Spreedlyâs core technical architecture. You will ensure our platform is scalable, performant, reliable, and continues to meet the needs of a global payments ecosystem. Youâll collaborate closely with Engineering, SRE, Product, and Security to guide architectural decisions, evolve system design, and improve resiliency and developer experience. This is a hands-on role that blends strategic system design with deep technical curiosity. Youâll influence across teams, mentor senior engineers, and ensure technical decisions align with long-term business goals.

Requirements

10+ years of experience designing and operating production-grade systems at scale
Experience working with mission-critical, high-availability platforms (e.g., payments, ad tech, telecom, large-scale SaaS).
Deep understanding of distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous messaging, and data modeling
Proven experience in modernizing monolithic applications into modular or service-oriented architectures
Experience with Ruby and Node.js; exposure to Elixir or other functional programming languages is a plus.
Expertise in PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, or equivalent distributed databases; experience with schema design and performance tuning
Familiarity with Kafka, event-driven patterns, containerization, and AWS
Strong communicatorâable to align engineering, product, and leadership around complex trade-offs
Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence cross-team decisions without direct authority
Practical experience implementing observability frameworks, CI/CD improvements, and infrastructure-as-code patterns

Nice To Haves

Prior exposure to global-scale infrastructure challenges (multi-region architecture, resiliency patterns, throughput optimization)
Certifications in Cloud Architecture (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Strong grounding in SDLC maturity, testing automation, and change management best practices
Ability to connect technical design to measurable business outcomes

Responsibilities

Architect for Scale and Reliability: Design and evolve core services and APIs to support high-throughput, low-latency payment processing at global scale.
Guide System Evolution: Define architecture blueprints for modernization (service decomposition, event-driven design, database scaling, and observability).
Technical Governance: Establish technical standards, review designs, and ensure consistency in architectural principles across teams.
Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Management, SRE, and Security to balance speed, safety, and scalability in solution design.
Hands-On Leadership: Prototype and validate new patterns, tools, and infrastructure approaches that improve reliability and developer velocity.
Mentorship and Multiplication: Coach Staff and Senior Engineers to think systemically and make architectural decisions aligned to business and customer outcomes.
Performance and Observability: Partner with SRE to define SLOs/SLIs, optimize performance, and ensure end-to-end visibility across distributed systems.
Security and Compliance Mindset: Embed secure coding, data protection, and PCI DSS best practices into architectural design and decision-making.

Benefits

Competitive salary + Equity
Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid options
Company-paid Life and Disability insurance
Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents
Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly)
$1,000 annual professional development stipend
Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement
Access to company-paid professional coaching service
Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees