Senior API Architect

We're Hiring: Senior Application Architect

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to developing secure, scalable, resilient, and high-performing digital applications that support business growth and evolving customer needs.

Our Technology, Engineering, Product, Data, Security, Infrastructure, and Operations teams collaborate to design modern application ecosystems that enable reliable business processes, digital experiences, automation, and long-term technology transformation across diverse markets.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Application Architect to lead application architecture strategy, solution design, application modernization, technology standards, system scalability, security, integration, and technical governance.

The ideal candidate will provide senior technical leadership across complex application environments, translating business and functional requirements into robust application architectures while balancing performance, maintainability, security, scalability, cost, and long-term technology strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain application architecture strategies aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Define current-state and target-state application architectures across enterprise and digital platforms.
• Establish application architecture principles, standards, patterns, reference architectures, and governance frameworks.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient, maintainable, and high-performing application solutions.
• Lead application architecture for enterprise systems, digital platforms, customer applications, internal applications, and business-critical services.
• Translate business requirements, functional requirements, and non-functional requirements into application architecture designs.
• Assess application workloads, business processes, user requirements, performance expectations, security requirements, and scalability needs.
• Define application components, services, modules, interfaces, dependencies, data flows, and technology choices.
• Design modular and reusable application architectures that support long-term maintainability and extensibility.
• Evaluate monolithic, modular, service-oriented, microservices, event-driven, and cloud-native application architectures.
• Determine appropriate architecture patterns based on business complexity, application criticality, team capability, and operational requirements.
• Develop application modernization strategies for legacy systems and technology platforms.
• Assess legacy applications for technical debt, scalability constraints, security weaknesses, maintainability issues, and modernization opportunities.
• Develop application transformation roadmaps covering refactoring, replatforming, rearchitecting, replacement, and retirement.
• Design application architectures that integrate effectively with enterprise APIs, middleware, data platforms, infrastructure, and external services.
• Collaborate with Integration Architects to define appropriate API, messaging, event, and service-integration approaches.
• Define application API standards covering interface design, versioning, security, documentation, error handling, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with Data Architects to ensure application designs support appropriate data models, data ownership, integrity, access, and lifecycle requirements.
• Define application data-access patterns and ensure appropriate separation of application and data responsibilities.
• Design application security architectures in collaboration with Cybersecurity and Identity teams.
• Incorporate authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, secure coding, and application security controls into architecture designs.
• Ensure application architectures support privacy, regulatory, compliance, and information-security requirements.
• Define application performance, scalability, availability, resilience, and disaster-recovery requirements.
• Design high-availability application architectures that minimize service disruption and single points of failure.
• Establish application resilience patterns including retry, timeout, circuit breaker, caching, load balancing, failover, and graceful degradation.
• Define application observability requirements covering logging, monitoring, tracing, metrics, alerting, and operational dashboards.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure and Cloud Architects to define appropriate hosting, compute, storage, networking, and cloud-service requirements.
• Evaluate cloud-native application architectures and determine appropriate use of managed services, containers, serverless technologies, and platform services.
• Support cloud migration and application modernization programs.
• Develop application deployment architectures across development, testing, staging, and production environments.
• Promote DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous delivery practices.
• Define application lifecycle-management standards covering development, testing, deployment, maintenance, upgrades, and retirement.
• Establish architecture governance processes for application design reviews, technology decisions, exceptions, and standards compliance.
• Lead architecture review boards, design workshops, technical assessments, and architecture decision forums.
• Review solution designs and technical proposals produced by development teams, vendors, and implementation partners.
• Challenge technical assumptions and ensure proposed solutions meet architectural, operational, security, and business requirements.
• Develop architecture diagrams, component models, sequence diagrams, deployment diagrams, data-flow diagrams, and technical decision records.
• Maintain application architecture repositories, technology inventories, standards, and reference models.
• Evaluate application technologies, frameworks, programming languages, platforms, libraries, and development tools.
• Assess emerging technologies and determine their potential business and technical value.
• Evaluate AI-enabled applications, automation technologies, cloud-native platforms, event-driven systems, and emerging application-development approaches.
• Conduct technology proof-of-concepts and architecture experiments to validate technical feasibility.
• Assess third-party software, SaaS platforms, commercial applications, and technology solutions against architectural requirements.
• Participate in RFPs, technical evaluations, vendor selection, and solution due diligence.
• Define technical requirements, architecture standards, integration expectations, security requirements, and acceptance criteria for external technology providers.
• Monitor application technical debt and establish prioritized remediation roadmaps.

Key Performance Indicators

• Application architecture compliance
• Architecture review completion
• Application availability
• Application uptime
• Critical application incident rate
• Application performance
• Application response time
• Application scalability
• Application reliability
• Mean time to recover
• Mean time to resolve application incidents
• Recurring application incident reduction
• Production defect rate
• Application deployment success rate
• Release stability
• Automated testing coverage
• Application security compliance
• Vulnerability remediation performance
• Secure-design compliance
• API architecture compliance
• Application integration reliability
• Application data-quality performance
• Application modernization progress
• Legacy application retirement
• Technical-debt reduction
• Application portfolio rationalization
• Cloud adoption progress
• Cloud migration success rate
• Architecture standards adoption
• Reusable component adoption
• Application automation coverage
• CI/CD adoption
• Observability coverage
• Monitoring and logging completeness
• Disaster-recovery readiness
• Recovery time objective achievement
• Recovery point objective achievement
• Infrastructure and application capacity utilization
• Application project delivery performance
• Architecture decision turnaround time
• Proof-of-concept success rate
• Vendor solution compliance
• Application lifecycle compliance
• Technology cost optimization
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Architecture documentation completeness
• Production-readiness compliance

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in application architecture, software architecture, solution architecture, enterprise application design, cloud application architecture, or digital platform architecture, preferably within a complex, multinational, technology-driven, or highly regulated environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong understanding of enterprise application architecture principles and design patterns.
• Proven experience designing complex, scalable, secure, and highly available applications.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture patterns including layered, modular, service-oriented, microservices, event-driven, and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience designing enterprise applications across multiple business domains and technology platforms.
• Strong understanding of application lifecycle management and software-development practices.
• Experience with modern programming languages and application-development frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, service interfaces, messaging, events, and application integration.
• Experience designing RESTful APIs and understanding of API lifecycle and governance.
• Strong understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure software architecture.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.