Java Solutions Architect Jobs in Chicago, IL (NOW HIRING)

***This role is 3 days onsite each week in Chicago***

***Position is bonus eligible***

Prestigious Financial Institution is currently seeking a Principal Solutions Architect with strong Capital Markets experience. Candidate will be working alongside experts that are building next generation clearing system; and paving the future of digital transformation in the capital markets industry.

Responsibilities:

• Design the applications’ architecture across distributed and enterprise technology platforms while leveraging patterns such as event-driven architecture, publish/subscribe messaging, and microservices while using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices to enable consistent, repeatable, and automated provisioning across environments.
• Define and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Design streaming and batch-based systems that support both real-time and scheduled data flow across the organization.
• Shape and guide the architecture of message-based systems utilizing Kafka or similar platforms to enable reliable, decoupled, event-driven communication between services.
• Develop and oversee data architecture and integration strategies spanning streaming, batch, and message-based processing to ensure reliable, secure, and efficient data flow across systems.
• Own end-to-end solution architecture from ideation through implementation, including documentation of architectural decisions and system diagrams.
• Guide the development and deployment of distributed, cloud-native services, ensuring resilience, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
• Collaborate with DevOps, platform engineering, and security teams to ensure architectures are operable, resilient, and aligned with organizational standards.
• Review designs and code from engineering teams to ensure alignment with architectural standards, security requirements, and regulatory/compliance needs.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex, cross-system issues spanning application, infrastructure, messaging, and data layers.
• Partner with engineering, data, and business teams to translate business requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions.
• Translate complex architectural decisions and trade-offs into clear, actionable insights for business stakeholders and non-technical audiences to support informed decision-making.
• Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and technologies, and provide recommendations for adoption.
• Mentor engineering teams on architectural best practices, distributed systems, event-driven and batch processing design.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

Qualifications:

• BS degree in Computer Science, similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of work experience in the capital markets industry.
• Demonstrated experience in one or more of the following domains: event-driven and message-based systems, transaction processing systems, distributed and parallel computing.
• Solid experience designing application architectures across distributed and enterprise technology platforms, including microservices and streaming or batch-based applications
• Experience with projects involving complex integration of disparate types of technologies/platforms and data.
• Experience architecting large-scale distributed systems.
• Architect Kubernetes-based deployment topology for stateless services and on-demand jobs, including horizontal pod autoscaling, multi-AZ resilience, and cross-region/on-prem failover and disaster recovery strategies (hot-hot, S3 replication).
• Fluent in object-oriented design, industry best practices, software patterns, and architecture principles.
• Experience defining and documenting architecture strategies, designs, and requirements across all enterprise architecture domains – business, information systems (applications & data), and technology.
• Experience defining non-functional requirements (NFRs) including performance, scalability, availability, and security and others as well as ensuring applications’ architecture are designed to satisfy them.
• Highly motivated with a strong sense of ownership of their work/projects.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.

Technical Skills:

• Software development experience in Java, Python, or C#, including building high-throughput, low-latency services for data-intensive or transaction-oriented systems
• Strong knowledge of Kafka or other messaging/streaming systems, including topic design, partitioning strategies, and producer/consumer patterns for reliable, event-driven communication.
• Fluent in object-oriented design principles, software design patterns, and modern architecture practices (e.g., microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design), with the ability to apply them to real-world, large-scale systems.
• Knowledge of identity and access management using OAuth2/OIDC flows (client credentials, authorization code with PKCE), JWT-based token validation, and integration with identity providers (e.g., ForgeRock, SailPoint).
• Knowledge of schema management and data serialization formats, preferably Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), including schema evolution
• Understanding of data lake-house architecture and table formats such as Apache Iceberg
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code principles and tooling preferably Terraform to enable repeatable, automated environment design.
• Working knowledge of DevOps tooling and practices such as Git, Jenkins, Docker, Artifactory, ArgoCD, and others to support automated build, test, and deployment of distributed, containerized applications.
• Experience working with Cloud ecosystems (AWS, PaaS, K8s)