System Architect

Description:

Papaya Global is a rapidly growing, award-winning B2B tech unicorn with an ambitious mission to revolutionize the payroll & payments industry. With over $400M raised from multiple tier-one investors, our innovative technology provides a comprehensive solution for managing global workforces, encompassing everything from hiring and onboarding to managing and paying employees in over 160 countries.

About the Role

We're looking for a System Architect to join Papaya's central Architects Team — a small group of senior architects that partners with every R&D department in the company. In this role you won't own a single product silo; instead, you'll move across domains (payments, payroll, workforce management, platform, data, security) to help teams shape sound, scalable, secure systems and to keep Papaya's overall technical direction coherent.

This is a hands-on architecture role at the intersection of engineering, product, security, and DevOps. You'll be expected to dive deep into unfamiliar domains quickly, influence without direct authority, and bring the highest bar of technical thinking — including modern AI-assisted engineering practices — to everything you touch.

If you're energized by hard problems at global scale, by working across many teams rather than one, and by shaping how a modern engineering organization actually builds software in the age of AI, this role is for you.

What You'll Do

• Lead architectural design across multiple Papaya domains and infrastructure systems, ensuring solutions meet business, scalability, performance, and compliance needs.
• Act as a trusted architectural partner to R&D, Product, Security, and DevOps teams — translating business and product requirements into clear technical direction.
• Define and maintain high-level architecture across domains, with a focus on seamless integration, maintainability, and long-term evolvability.
• Build hands-on Proofs of Concept (POCs) to de-risk architectural decisions, validate new technologies, and demonstrate viable paths forward before broad investment.
• Lead technical Due Diligence on third-party vendors, platforms, and integrations — evaluating architecture fit, scalability, security posture, compliance, operational maturity, and long-term cost.
• Drive secure-by-design practices, embedding security, privacy, and regulatory considerations into every stage of system design.
• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies, frameworks, and patterns — including AI/LLM-based capabilities — where they create real leverage for the business.
• Champion the adoption of AI-powered engineering tools and agentic workflows across R&D, helping teams use them effectively, safely, and consistently.
• Define and steward Papaya's architectural guidelines, standards, and best practices, and help ensure they are actually applied in day-to-day delivery.
• Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance to development teams across the company.
• Review designs, RFCs, and critical implementations to maintain architectural consistency and system quality across projects.

Experience & background

• 8+ years of proven experience as a System / Software Architect designing robust, scalable systems.
• 12+ years of hands-on software development experience, with strong proficiency in Java (preferred) or an equivalent backend language.
• Proven experience building enterprise SaaS platforms, self-service products, and highly scaled production systems.
• Experience in financial technology (FinTech) or other regulated industries is a strong advantage.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Technical depth

• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture; strong advantage for AWS (Lambda, ECS, S3, RDS, IAM, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong command of software design patterns, SDLC, and system integration strategies.
• Expertise in design paradigms such as DDD, TDD, EDD, and principles like SOLID, KISS, DRY, SSOT, and CQS.
• Solid grasp of security fundamentals: encryption, authentication, authorization, data privacy, and secure coding practices.
• Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL databases, and API design using REST and GraphQL.
• Practical experience with Git branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, and Agile development practices.

AI-powered engineering (required)

• Deep, hands-on experience with at least one agentic AI coding tool such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot (Agent Mode), or Codex CLI — used regularly on real, non-trivial work.
• Practical fluency with AI productivity tools across the broader workflow: LLM chat assistants for design and review, AI-assisted code review, documentation generation, and research.
• Ability to design effective context for AI agents — writing good prompts, structuring repos and docs (e.g. CLAUDE.md / rules files) so agents perform well, and knowing when to delegate vs. when to drive manually.
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and the broader pattern of connecting AI agents to internal tools, data sources, and services.
• Awareness of the security, privacy, IP, and quality risks of AI-assisted development, and opinions on how to mitigate them at an organizational level.
• Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities and agent-based components into backend products and workflows is a strong plus.

Ways of working

• Demonstrated ability to drive end-to-end delivery of complex features — from architecture through production.
• Excellent analytical skills and a strong self-learning instinct; comfortable ramping up quickly on unfamiliar domains.
• Strong communication and influencing skills — able to align engineers, product managers, and senior stakeholders around a technical direction.
• Excellent written and verbal English.