Solution Architect (Engineer + Product + Architecture)

Job Description

About the Role

We're looking for an exceptional Solution Architect to own and shape our GoTymeX architecture. This isn't an ivory tower architecture role where you create perfect designs in isolation. You'll be in action with product and engineering teams, making pragmatic technology decisions that balance speed, cost, and quality.

This role demands someone who can think like a business owner and build like an engineer - someone who obsesses over simplicity, cost efficiency, and customer/business value. You'll challenge expensive vendor solutions, advocate for building vs. buying when it makes sense, and constantly ask, "Is there a simpler, cheaper way to solve this?" You'll live with your decisions through code reviews, incident responses, and operational feedback loops - ensuring your architectures aren't just elegant on paper but resilient in production.

Please note that expat candidates will need to relocate to Ho Chi Minh City.

What You'll Do

Drive Product & Business Value

• Partner with Product Owners and Engineering to challenge requirements and solve real customer problems
• Design with customer empathy - slow approvals lose customers, confusing flows increase defaults
• Prioritize ruthlessly based on impact - simple solutions that ship fast beat "perfect" architectures that take months
• Build lean, cost-efficient systems for price-sensitive markets

Lead Technical Architecture

• Champion simplicity - systems any engineer can understand, question assumptions and push for simpler, faster, cheaper solutions
• Design secure, resilient, scalable architectures that handle peak loads and graceful failures
• Bridge technology-business gaps by translating complex concepts into clear business language

Enable & Grow Teams

• Empower teams to make decisions - coach, don't command
• Stay on the ground through code reviews to validate architectural assumptions
• Pair with engineers during complex implementations and production incidents
• Participate in post-mortems and operational reviews - own and improve when designs cause issues
• Mentor engineers to think architecturally and delegate decisions as teams mature
• Foster psychological safety where teams challenge ideas and admit mistakes freely

Continuously Learn & Improve

• Stay ahead of evolving technologies, industry best practices, and competitive landscapes
• Question assumptions relentlessly - "We've always done it this way" is not a reason
• Be intellectually honest: "This design is complex because I don't fully understand the problem yet."

Requirements

What We're Looking For

Engineering Foundation :

• 8+ years in software engineering, especially backend systems (APIs, databases, message queues, distributed systems, event-driven architectures)

• Designed complex, distributed systems balancing consistency, availability e.g., understand trade-offs: When to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, when strict consistency matters vs. eventual consistency is acceptable
• Handle failure scenarios: Network partitions, service outages, database failures—design for graceful degradation

• Cloud-native systems: Good experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP—compute, storage, databases, messaging, managed services. You know how to build cost-efficient cloud architectures.
• Databases & data modeling: Strong understanding of relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases.
• DevSecOps: Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes/ECS), infrastructure-as-code, monitoring/observability (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch), secure coding, OWASP basics.

Product & Leadership:

• Product thinking: Track record of making technology decisions that drive business outcomes—faster time-to-market, lower costs, better customer experience, higher approval rates, lower default rates.
• Customer empathy: Can articulate how technical decisions impact borrowers. You've analyzed customer feedback, reviewed support tickets, or talked to customers struggling with loan applications or repayments.
• Cost-conscious engineering: Experience optimizing for cost—choosing cheaper infrastructure, building instead of buying expensive SaaS, batching to reduce compute, caching to reduce database load. You think like a business owner.
• Simplicity advocate: Portfolio of simple, elegant solutions that delivered massive value. Can point to complex problems you solved with surprisingly simple architectures. Resist over-engineering.
• Team enablement: Experience coaching and mentoring engineers—not managing them. You've helped teams level up their technical judgment and decision-making autonomy.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Comfortable working with Product, Credit Risk, Collections, Finance, Compliance, and Operations teams. You translate between technical and business languages fluently.

Nice-to-have

• AI/LLM engineer: Experience integrating large language models for applications such as customer support chatbots, document processing, or decision assistance.
• Understanding of financial concepts: Transaction lifecycles, accounting, reconciliation, and settlement.
• Programming languages: Java, Kotlin, and Python.
• Frameworks: Spring ecosystem (most backend services are Spring-based).
• AWS services: ECS/EKS, Fargate, Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, MSK, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3, etc.

Our Engineering Principles

Beyond skills, we're looking for someone who embodies these principles:

✅ Simplicity over complexity: The best solution is the simplest one. Complexity is a tax—avoid it.
✅ Lean over lavish: Cost-efficient architectures that deliver value. Question every expense.
✅ Pragmatism over perfection: Ship value iteratively. "Good enough" today beats "perfect" never.
✅ Outcomes over outputs: Measure success by business impact (loans disbursed, defaults reduced, costs saved), not technical elegance.
✅ Enablement over heroics: Make teams successful. Don't be the lone genius solving every problem.
✅ Learning over knowing: Admit when you don't know. Experiment, fail fast, iterate.
✅ Empathy over ego: Listen more than talk. Respect diverse perspectives. Assume positive intent.

Benefits

• Meal and parking allowance are covered by the company.
• Full benefits and salary rank during probation.
• Insurances as Vietnamese labor law and premium health care for you and your family without seniority compulsory
• Performance bonus up to 2 months
• 13th month salary pro-rata
• 15-day annual leave+ 3-day sick leave + 1 birthday leave + 1 Christmas leave
• SMART goals and clear career opportunities (technical seminar, conference, and career talk) - we focus on your development.
• Values-driven, international working environment, and agile culture.
• Overseas travel opportunities for training and working related.
• Internal Hackathons and company's events (team building, coffee run, blue card...)
• Work-life balance 40-hr per week from Mon to Fri.