Director - Product Architecture

Key Accountabilities

• Lead end-to-end product architecture design for telecom & retail platforms, ensuring scalability, performance, security, reliability, and AI readiness.
• Drive architectural transformation initiatives including migration from monolithic systems to microservices and cloud-native platforms.
• Define AI-enabled architecture patterns for personalization, recommendations, analytics, and intelligent automation within retail products.
• Gather, analyze, and translate product requirements into scalable technical architecture and detailed design specifications.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineering teams, data teams, and stakeholders to ensure architectural alignment with business goals.
• Design and review APIs, service interactions, data models, and event-driven architectures using Kafka.
• Develop detailed documents covering system flows, microservices interactions, databases, APIs, AI pipelines, and deployment architecture.
• Guide teams on Java, Angular, MERN stack implementation aligned with architectural standards.
• Ensure cloud architecture aligns with SaaS principles including multi-tenancy, high availability, horizontal scalability, and ML workloads.
• Lead integration of AI/ML and Generative AI capabilities into product platforms using cloud-native services and open-source frameworks.
• Support engineering teams through design reviews, technical mentoring, and architectural governance.
• Work closely with DevOps and MLOps teams to ensure CI/CD pipelines, model deployment, automation, and cloud infrastructure support product scalability.
• Partner with QA teams to ensure architecture supports automated testing, performance testing, security validation, and AI model quality.
• Identify opportunities to improve platform intelligence, customer experience, system quality, and engineering productivity.
• Stay updated with emerging technologies, retail industry trends, and modern architecture practices including AI and GenAI

Mandatory Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field.
• 14–18 years of experience in software engineering and product architecture.
• Strong Retail domain experience (e-commerce, loyalty, promotions, customer engagement, or commerce platforms).
• Proven experience in product architecture transformation and modernization.
• Strong hands-on expertise in:
• Java / Spring Boot
• Angular
• MERN Stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js)
• Microservices Architecture
• Kafka / Event-driven systems
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Experience designing scalable, distributed systems and SaaS platforms.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML or Generative AI into product platforms.
• Strong understanding of API design, system integration, data architecture, and AI pipelines.
• Experience creating detailed architectural and technical documentation.
• Proficiency with Agile development methodologies.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.

Desirable Skills

• Exposure to DevOps and MLOps practices.
• Knowledge of cloud security, observability, and performance engineering.
• Experience with recommendation systems, personalization engines, or analytics platforms.
• Prior experience mentoring architects and senior engineers.
• Familiarity with LLMs, vector databases, RAG architectures, and AI governance frameworks.