Software Architect - Bangalore

About Apica

At Apica, we build observability platforms that help businesses detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. We value engineers with strong fundamentals, deep technical rigor, and a focus on building scalable, reliable systems. If you enjoy hard engineering challenges, write high-quality code, and think from first principles, you’ll thrive here.

Position Summary

We are seeking an experienced Software Architect to provide technical leadership and architectural direction across our SaaS and On-Premises platforms. The ideal candidate will define system architectures that are scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-efficient while supporting diverse business and engineering needs. This role requires strategic vision, deep technical proficiency, and the ability to influence design decisions across multiple teams and functional areas.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture and Design

• Lead the definition and evolution of system architecture across distributed, cloud-native, and hybrid environments.
• Review and validate design proposals with a focus on scalability, fault-tolerance, and maintainability.
• Guide the design of data flows, integration patterns, and storage architecture to ensure efficiency and correctness.
• Make final determinations on architectural trade-offs balancing performance, cost, and business objectives.

Engineering Standards and Governance

• Define and maintain engineering standards, templates, and foundational repository structures.
• Establish consistent design principles, security guidelines, and coding practices across teams.
• Serve as a final reviewer for high-risk or high-impact changes requiring architectural oversight.

Cross-Team and Deployment Collaboration

• Coordinate architectural alignment across SaaS and On-Premises product lines.
• Partner with Product Management, Infrastructure, and Platform Engineering to ensure smooth release and deployment processes.
• Act as a technical liaison for complex integration and cross-functional initiatives.

Dependency and Technical Debt Management

• Lead planning and execution for dependency upgrades, toolchain modernization, and compatibility maintenance.
• Identify and mitigate risks introduced by outdated libraries, frameworks, or architectural bottlenecks.
• Ensure a proactive approach to managing technical debt across codebases and projects.

Observability, Cost, and Performance

• Collaborate with operations and infrastructure teams to define and maintain system observability frameworks, including logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization initiatives for cloud and on-premises workloads.
• Monitor infrastructure trends and identify opportunities for performance and efficiency improvements.

Advisory and Knowledge Stewardship

• Serve as an internal advisor for complex or ambiguous technical challenges across teams.
• Maintain awareness of prior architectural decisions and lessons learned to guide future improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to technical strategy, long-term roadmaps, and design best practices.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years in software engineering, with at least 3 years in an architectural or principal engineering role.
• Proven expertise in SaaS and On-Premises architecture, distributed systems, and hybrid deployments.
• Proven expertise in Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of database architecture, storage management, and data modeling.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD automation tools (e.g., Jenkins, Harness, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI).
• Skilled in Go, Python.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and leadership abilities with demonstrated influence across engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event-driven architecture using technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, workload optimization, or intelligent cost management.
• Proficiency with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/EFK stack).
• Exposure to AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
• Background in enterprise-scale system benchmarking and architectural review processes.