Chief Architect

Job description

**About Rupeek:** **Rupeek** , established in 2015 and headquartered in Bangalore, stands as India's leading asset-backed digital lending fintech platform. Committed to making credit accessible to Indians in a fair and convenient manner, Rupeek pioneers innovative financial products focused on monetizing India's $2 trillion gold market. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology and an automated asset-light supply chain, Rupeek is transforming the gold loan disbursal landscape across 40+ cities in India. With a customer base exceeding 5,00,000+, the company's strategic partnerships with top banks and financial institutions underscore its commitment to building gold-backed assets through low-risk, low-touch, and friction-free processes. Rupeek's impressive journey is supported by key investors such as Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Bertelsmann, and GGV Capital. ***In Apr 2024, Rupeek turned profitable and raised* $25 *in equity capital from Manipal Group and Elevation Capital to fund its next phase of growth* .** Join us in redefining the future of finance through innovation, technology, and a commitment to financial inclusivity. **About the Role:** ***Rupeek*** is looking for a hands-on Chief Architect to define and drive the company’s overall technology and architecture vision across its fintech platforms. The role involves building scalable, secure, and high-performing lending and financial systems, leading critical architecture decisions, mentoring senior engineering talent, and partnering closely with business and technology leadership to translate business goals into robust technology solutions. This position is ideal for a deeply technical leader with strong fintech experience who thrives in high-scale, fast-paced environments and continues to stay actively involved in system design and engineering execution. **Key Responsibilities** - Sets the overall technical vision and architecture direction for Rupeek across RFPL and RCPL. - Co-owns architectural decisions with Engineering Directors (CX & Logistics; Lending); has final say on cross-cutting concerns (security, data, platform, inter-service contracts). - Hands-on in design and code; personally leads the most complex, high-impact problems — lending core, ledger correctness, scale events, regulatory deadlines. - Owns architectural standards: design reviews, code reviews, architecture review board, tech radar, deprecation roadmaps. - Drives a culture of innovation and engineering excellence; mentors Staff and Principal engineers across both entities. - Partners with the CTO, CEO, and business leaders to translate business strategy into technology investments — and vice versa. - Senior-most technical voice in regulatory and audit conversations (RBI, CERT-In, statutory auditors). **Required skills:** **Domain (non-negotiable)** - Prior experience in fintech, with direct hands-on experience building lending systems, ledgers, LMS, payments, or core banking. - Has shipped and operated systems with money movement, double-entry accounting, reconciliation, and audit trails in production. - Good to have - Understands regulatory architecture — RBI guidelines (Digital Lending, IT Outsourcing, Cyber Security), PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, DPDP / data localization. **Technical Depth** - Minimum 12+ years overall; built and operated systems at scale (millions of transactions, multi-region, high availability). - Deep in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and data platforms - Strong in AWS (primary cloud) — networking, IAM, cost architecture, security primitives. - Security architecture: threat modeling, zero-trust, IAM design, secrets management, incident response architecture. - AI/ML platform thinking: how to architect for AI-native workflows, internal developer platforms, and AI-assisted engineering toolchains. **Leadership** - Exceptional written and verbal communication — can write a memo that a CFO and a junior engineer both understand. - Influences without authority; co-owns outcomes with people who don't report to them. - Insists on high standards; has a strong backbone; comfortable disagreeing with senior leaders including the CEO. - Has mentored and grown Staff/Principal engineers; visibly humble and accessible. **Persona** - Engineering degree in Computer Science o r related; advanced degree a plus but not required. - Has operated in both scale-up and large-company environments; comfortable with ambiguity. - Recent hands-on work — not a slide-deck architect who hasn't shipped in 3 years. - Bonus: experience at an Indian fintech, NBFC, or payments company; or a global fintech with India operations.