The Staff Architect will design and govern the core architecture of Spreedly's platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability. The role involves collaboration across teams, mentorship, technical governance, and hands-on leadership in system evolution and performance optimization.
About Us:
Spreedly is the world's leading Open Payments Platform, sitting at the center of a network processing more than $50b of GMV annually. Spreedly's Payments Orchestration platform enables and optimizes digital transactions with the world’s most complete payment services marketplace. Built on Spreedly’s PCI-compliant architecture, our Advanced Vault solution combines a modern feature-set with rule-based configurations to optimize the vaulting experience for all stored payment methods. Global enterprises and hyper-growth companies grow their digital business faster by relying on our payments platform. Hundreds of customers worldwide secure card data in our PCI-compliant vault and use tokenized card data to enable and optimize over $45 billion of annual transaction volumes with any payment service.
Our vision is that the world is better with a diversified, inclusive payment ecosystem. Our mission is to accelerate commerce with an open, secure, and flexible payment platform that welcomes all payment participants. Our employees help us execute our vision by building a culture focused on autonomy, transparency, and collaboration in a dynamic, high-growth organization.
Product Offering:
Spreedly provides an open payments platform. The platform’s connectivity provides payments performance. Key products and services include:
Payment Gateway Integration: Connects merchants, platforms, and marketplaces to multiple payment gateways and payment services.
Tokenization: Securely stores and manages payment data with a universal tokenization service.
Transaction Routing: Enables intelligent routing of transactions to optimize success rates and costs.
Payment Vault: A secure storage solution for sensitive payment information.
Fraud Tools Integration: Integrates with various fraud prevention tools to enhance transaction security.
About the Role:
The Staff Architect is a senior engineering leader responsible for designing, evolving, and governing Spreedly’s core technical architecture. You will ensure our platform is scalable, performant, reliable, and continues to meet the needs of a global payments ecosystem. You’ll collaborate closely with Engineering, SRE, Product, and Security to guide architectural decisions, evolve system design, and improve resiliency and developer experience.
This is a hands-on role that blends strategic system design with deep technical curiosity. You’ll influence across teams, mentor senior engineers, and ensure technical decisions align with long-term business goals.
Technologies we use: Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Node.js, AWS, JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue.js, Phoenix, CockroachDB, Heroku, Postgres, Kafka, RabbitMQ
Responsibilities:
- Architect for Scale and Reliability: Design and evolve core services and APIs to support high-throughput, low-latency payment processing at global scale.
- Guide System Evolution: Define architecture blueprints for modernization (service decomposition, event-driven design, database scaling, and observability).
- Technical Governance: Establish technical standards, review designs, and ensure consistency in architectural principles across teams.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Management, SRE, and Security to balance speed, safety, and scalability in solution design.
- Hands-On Leadership: Prototype and validate new patterns, tools, and infrastructure approaches that improve reliability and developer velocity.
- Mentorship and Multiplication: Coach Staff and Senior Engineers to think systemically and make architectural decisions aligned to business and customer outcomes.
- Performance and Observability: Partner with SRE to define SLOs/SLIs, optimize performance, and ensure end-to-end visibility across distributed systems.
- Security and Compliance Mindset: Embed secure coding, data protection, and PCI DSS best practices into architectural design and decision-making.
Requirements:
- 10+ years of experience designing and operating production-grade systems at scale
- Experience working with mission-critical, high-availability platforms (e.g., payments, ad tech, telecom, large-scale SaaS).
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous messaging, and data modeling
- Proven experience in modernizing monolithic applications into modular or service-oriented architectures
- Experience with Ruby and Node.js; exposure to Elixir or other functional programming languages is a plus.
- Expertise in PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, or equivalent distributed databases; experience with schema design and performance tuning
- Familiarity with Kafka, event-driven patterns, containerization, and AWS
- Strong communicator—able to align engineering, product, and leadership around complex trade-offs
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence cross-team decisions without direct authority
- Practical experience implementing observability frameworks, CI/CD improvements, and infrastructure-as-code patterns
Additional Skills We Value:
- Prior exposure to global-scale infrastructure challenges (multi-region architecture, resiliency patterns, throughput optimization)
- Certifications in Cloud Architecture (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Strong grounding in SDLC maturity, testing automation, and change management best practices
- Ability to connect technical design to measurable business outcomes
We Offer Our US-Based Employees:
- Competitive salary + Equity
- Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid options
- Company-paid Life and Disability insurance
- Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
- Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents
- Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly)
- $1,000 annual professional development stipend
- Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement
- Access to company-paid professional coaching service
- Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees
We champion the ethical, creative use of AI—if you’re someone who pairs human judgment with modern AI tools to work smarter and drive bigger impact, you’ll thrive here.
--
Spreedly is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We actively work to drive out even unintentional discrimination in our hiring processes via practices like blindly graded work samples, structured interviews, and diversity awareness training.
Due to the sensitive nature of what Spreedly does - handling payment data - finalist candidates must complete a successful background and reference check.
At this time Spreedly is unable to provide sponsorship for employment, and we are not set up to support remote employees who reside in New York. In order to be considered for employment, applicants must be currently legally authorized to work in the job location country and not require future sponsorship in order to continue working in that country.
We appreciate your interest in our company. Because of the high volume of resume flow, we may only respond to those candidates that we think will be a potential fit.
--
#LI-AE1
Top Skills
AWS
Cockroachdb
Elixir
Heroku
JavaScript
Kafka
Node.js
Phoenix
Postgres
RabbitMQ
Ruby on Rails
Ruby
Typescript
Vue
Similar Jobs
Big Data • Marketing Tech • Analytics
The Staff DevOps Architect will lead cloud platform architecture, improve SDLC processes, mentor engineering teams, and ensure production system reliability.
Top Skills:
AnsibleAWSAzureBashBitbucketGCPGitJenkinsPowershellPythonTerraformYaml
Information Technology • Software
The Staff Solutions Architect - AI leads engagements to implement AI applications using LaunchDarkly, guiding customers on best practices for AI delivery and experimentation, while addressing technical challenges and establishing feature management strategies.
Top Skills:
AIAWSAzureGCPGoJavaJavascript/Node.JsLaunchdarklyLow Code/No Code SolutionsMlPython
Software
The Staff Solutions Architect will lead DACH territory, providing technical guidance and architectural insights to customers, ensuring successful adoption of Temporal's solutions.
Top Skills:
AWSAzureC#GCPGoJavaPHPPythonRubyTypescript
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
