Senior Architect (Distributed Data Strategy Architect)

As a Senior Integration Architect (Data & APIs) at Empower, you will be both a strategic leader and hands-on technical expert responsible for designing and evolving enterprise integration architecture. Partnering with enterprise architects, application teams, and business leaders, you will define API-first and event-driven architectures that enable real-time, reliable, and scalable system communication.

You will drive standardized integration patterns such as RESTful / gRPC APIs, asynchronous messaging, and data contracts to ensure consistency, security, and resilience across the enterprise, while leading modernization efforts to reduce point-to-point integrations and enable loosely coupled systems across legacy and modern platforms. You will influence key architectural decisions, mentor engineering teams, and establish best practices for API lifecycle management, event-driven design, and distributed system reliability.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement API-first and event-driven architectures that enable scalable, real-time system communication

• Architect integration patterns including REST/gRPC APIs, asynchronous messaging, and event-driven workflows across distributed systems

• Define and enforce data contracts, schemas, and interface standards to ensure consistent, reliable data exchange across domains

• Design for resilience in distributed systems, including preventing duplicate processing, managing retries and replays, and ensuring fault tolerance

• Lead modernization of legacy integrations by reducing point-to-point dependencies and enabling loosely coupled architectures

• Establish best practices for API lifecycle management including versioning, documentation, security, and governance

• Provide architectural leadership through design reviews, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration to ensure consistent adoption of integration patterns

Required Skills

• Experience designing and implementing scalable integration solutions across distributed systems

• Strong understanding of API-based system design and modern integration approaches (e.g., synchronous and asynchronous patterns)

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging concepts in real-world applications

• Experience defining and managing interfaces or data exchange patterns across systems

• Understanding of reliability considerations in distributed systems (e.g., handling failures, retries, or duplicate processing)

• Experience working across a mix of legacy and modern systems in complex enterprise environments

• Proficiency in backend or service-based development using languages such as Java, Python, or similar

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Experience with API management platforms or gateways (e.g., Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management)

• Hands-on experience with messaging or streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)

• Familiarity with domain-driven design concepts (e.g., bounded contexts, service boundaries)

• Experience designing or working with contract-first APIs or schema-driven development approaches

• Exposure to cloud-native architectures and distributed system patterns in AWS, Azure, or GCP

• Experience participating in architecture governance processes (e.g., design reviews, reference architectures, ADRs)

• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional)

Education

• Bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in computer science or related field (information systems, mathematics, software engineering, etc.)

Physical Requirements/Working Conditions

• Normal Office Working Conditions