Role description

Principal Architect — Data Platform & Lakehouse Who We Look For

We are looking for a Principal Architect — Data Platform & Lakehouse to own the technical direction of enterprise data architecture, lakehouse capabilities, metadata, analytical infrastructure, and document management across the UST FinX platform.

This is a senior, hands-on architecture and engineering role — not an advisory or governance-only position. Your influence will come from designing scalable platforms, building reusable frameworks, defining strong architectural patterns, writing production-grade code, and helping engineering teams deliver data infrastructure that is reliable, secure, governed, observable, and usable.

You understand that a modern lakehouse is much more than object storage with a query engine. It requires disciplined table and data design, catalog and metadata architecture, schema and partition evolution, governance, access control, lifecycle management, performance engineering, and clear ownership of data products.

You remain close to implementation: building frameworks and platform services, reviewing data contracts, debugging pipelines, evolving metadata and catalog capabilities, and solving difficult production problems.

In an AI-assisted development workplace, you apply strong engineering judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output, ensuring that solutions meet high standards for correctness, resilience, security, scalability, and maintainability.

We value a collaborative, merit-driven engineering culture. Senior architects are expected to constructively challenge weak designs, reduce unnecessary complexity, establish reusable patterns, and help teams converge on sound technical decisions.

What You Will Do

Define and evolve the data platform and lakehouse architecture strategy for UST FinX.

Own the technical architecture of the lakehouse, including table design, catalog integration, schema and partition evolution, metadata, compaction, versioning, retention, performance, and governance.

Build reusable patterns, frameworks, and reference implementations for ingestion, storage, metadata, data access, analytics, document management, and data lifecycle management.

Provide technical ownership for enterprise data architecture across platform, integration, orchestration, document, and analytical capabilities.

Guide engineering teams on table design, catalog architecture, partitioning strategies, query performance, data lifecycle, and multi-tenant isolation.

Define standards for data contracts, metadata, lineage, governance, retention, access control, and data quality.

Work hands-on with platform services, ingestion frameworks, metadata services, storage abstractions, and supporting infrastructure.

Design ingestion patterns supporting batch, streaming, event-driven, change-data-capture, file-based, and API-based workloads.

Partner with backend, platform, data, security, DevOps, QA, product, and delivery teams to ship reliable and production-ready capabilities.

Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, code reviews, pairing, troubleshooting, and incident analysis.

Ensure data systems are secure, scalable, resilient, observable, cost-aware, and appropriate for regulated banking environments.

Reporting Line and Role Context

This role reports directly to the CTO of UST FinX.

You will operate as one of the CTO's senior technical leaders, creating engineering leverage across the organization while remaining deeply hands-on. You will influence multiple engineering teams, establish reusable standards,



mentor technical leaders, and turn architectural direction into production-quality implementation.

This is not a passive advisory role or a traditional people-management position. Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, and execution.

You will work closely with the CTO to establish engineering standards, identify architectural and implementation gaps, raise delivery quality, and ensure that architecture is reflected in real code and operational behaviour.

The objective is to act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.

Skills and Experience We Are Looking For

- Minimum 8 years of experience, ideally 10–15, across software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or architecture, with meaningful ownership of production-scale data platforms.

- Strong experience designing and implementing large-scale lakehouse or modern analytical data platforms in production.

- Deep understanding of transactional lakehouse table architectures, including versioning, schema evolution, partition evolution, compaction, historical access, maintenance, and performance optimisation.

- Strong knowledge of catalog, metadata, and metastore architectures and their role in managing large distributed data estates.

- Experience designing object-storage-based data platforms, including storage layout, lifecycle management, encryption, access control, cost management, and separation of data according to processing and governance requirements.

- Strong metadata management experience covering cataloguing, lineage, schema management, discoverability, governance, and auditability.

- Experience designing ingestion architectures across batch, streaming, event-driven, change-data-capture, file-based, and API-based integration patterns.

- Strong software engineering background with the ability to design, implement, review, and debug production platform and infrastructure code.

- Experience designing multi-tenant systems, including tenant isolation, access boundaries, metadata separation, and operational controls.

- Strong understanding of data governance, including ownership, classification, retention, access control, lineage, data quality, and regulatory expectations.

- Experience supporting analytical workloads, including data modelling, query optimisation, semantic abstraction, and business intelligence integration.

- Experience building reusable frameworks, libraries, platform capabilities, or shared infrastructure consumed by multiple engineering teams.

- Strong understanding of distributed systems and the trade-offs involved in reliability, consistency, scalability, recoverability, and performance.

- Strong communication and mentoring skills, with the ability to raise engineering and architecture maturity across globally distributed teams without relying on formal authority.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience designing and operating large-scale cloud-native data platforms.

- Experience with multiple distributed processing, streaming, analytical, and query architectures, and an understanding of when different approaches are appropriate.





- Experience operating transactional lakehouse technologies across multiple processing or query engines.

- Experience designing document-management infrastructure, including object-backed storage, metadata indexing, lifecycle management, retention, search, and integration with workflow or case-management systems.

- Experience designing event-driven ingestion platforms using durable messaging, schema management, event contracts, change-data-capture, and reliable transaction-to-event integration patterns.

- Experience building data platforms for financial services, banking, payments, lending, compliance, or other regulated enterprise environments.

- Experience with API-first and data-product-oriented architectures, including governed programmatic access to enterprise data.

- Strong understanding of data-platform observability, including pipeline health, data quality, freshness, operational metrics, ing, and production diagnostics.

- Experience implementing automated delivery, testing, data-contract validation, and production-readiness practices for data platforms.

- Solid understanding of cloud and data security patterns, including identity and access management, encryption, secrets management, network isolation, and fine-grained data access controls.

- Experience evaluating competing technologies based on workload characteristics, operational complexity, scalability, cost, and long-term maintainability rather than technology preference.

- Experience living with the long-term consequences of major data architecture decisions — supporting, scaling, troubleshooting, migrating, and evolving critical production platforms over time.

About UST FinX

UST FinX is a financial technology initiative within UST, focused on modernizing core banking infrastructure for mid-sized and large financial institutions. Backed by UST’s global engineering scale and deep experience in financial services, we combine product engineering, systems integration, and managed services into a unified transformation offering.

Our approach is centered on progressive modernization: coexisting with legacy systems, enabling hybrid architectures, and gradually transitioning toward fully API-driven, event-driven, cloud-ready banking platforms. We align closely with industry standards such as BIAN and emphasize interoperability, scalability, resilience, security, and operational control.

UST FinX operates as a long-term transformation partner rather than a traditional vendor, working closely with clients to reduce operational risk, simplify complex system landscapes, strengthen engineering maturity, and deliver measurable business outcomes such as faster product delivery, improved efficiency, better operational insight, and lower infrastructure cost.

We are building the backend engineering foundation that enables the next generation of digital banking.

Skills

Data Lakes, Data Modeling, Data Validation, Data Governance, Databricks, AWS Lake Formation, Snowflake, Apache Hive, AWS, SaaS, Enterprise Content Management

About UST
UST is a global digital transformation solutions provider. For more than 20 years, UST has worked side by side with the world’s best companies to make a real impact through transformation. Powered by technology, inspired by people and led by purpose, UST partners with their clients from design to operation. With deep domain expertise and a future-proof philosophy, UST embeds innovation and agility into their clients’ organizations. With over 30,000 employees in 30 countries, UST builds for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process.

📌 Specialist II - Product Architect- Data Platform & Lakehouse (Karnataka)
🏢 UST
📍 Karnataka