Chief Architect

The Chief Architect oversees the end-to-end technical architecture of the UIDAI, setting the technology vision, establishing standards, and guiding teams to build secure, reliable, and cost-efficient platforms at a national scale. This role steers enterprise, application, data, and security architectures; ensures architectural runway for product/mission goals; and leads cross-functional engineering decisions (build/buy, patterns, and roadmap trade-offs). The Chief Architect ensures this foundation is secure, scalable, and sustainable—enabling innovation while upholding trust and compliance.

About the Role

The Chief Architect oversees the end-to-end technical architecture of the UIDAI, setting the technology vision, establishing standards, and guiding teams to build secure, reliable, and cost-efficient platforms at a national scale.

Responsibilities

• Architecture Vision & Roadmap
• Define a 3–5 year architecture strategy aligned to UIDAI's mission statement and goals set out by the Authority;
• Publish a living reference architecture and target state.
• Maintain an architecture runway that de-risks next 2–3 quarters of delivery.

• Enterprise & Platform Architecture
• Standardize patterns for microservices, APIs, eventing, workflow, and data pipelines.
• Drive multi-DC / multi-region resiliency (active-active/active-passive), capacity planning, disaster recovery RTO/RPO.
• Establish golden paths (service templates, libraries, infra modules) to accelerate teams.

• Application & Integration Architecture
• Own API standards, event schemas, and backward compatibility.
• Promote efficient designs for high-throughput transfers; codify performance SLOs per journey.

• Data & AI Architecture
• Define data mesh/lakehouse principles, governance, lineage, and privacy controls.
• Standardize streaming (e.g., Kafka/Flink) and OLAP/observability stores; enable ML feature stores and online/offline parity.

• Security, Privacy & Compliance by Design
• Enforce secure coding, SBOM/SCA, secrets & key management, HSM/PKI usage, and privacy-preserving patterns (tokenization/SD-JWT VC where applicable).
• Embed threat modeling in design reviews; ensure regulatory compliance and auditability.

• DevEx & DevSecOps
• Institutionalise CI/CD, GitOps, IaC, progressive delivery, and automated quality gates.
• Champion observability standards (OTEL traces/logs/metrics), SLOs, and incident learning loops.

• Architecture Governance
• Chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB); run lightweight RFC process; track decision records (ADRs).
• Measure and reduce tech debt; manage vendor/OSS risk and cost.

• Leadership & Stakeholder Management
• Mentor Staff/Principal engineers, and solution architects to ensure technology complexities are understood very clearly to implement solutions expeditiously with high quality.
• Partner with Product, Security, Operations, Legal/Policy, and external ecosystems/standards bodies.
• Engage and work with cross-functional leaders to understand and help define business principles, goals and strategy within the scope of responsibility.
• Communicate to senior leaders regarding strategy direction and changes.

Must have leading experience in large scale functional environment like Bank, Pharma, Telecom, Fintech, e-Commerce etc..

Should have multidiscipline experience in Backend, Data/AI, Security etc

Current role should be Chief/Senior/Principal Architect.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering with 5+ years in architecture leadership.
• Proven experience leading architectures serving 10M+ users and petabyte-scale data systems.

Required Skills

• Quick & Excellent Problem Solving skills for complex & large-scale problems.
• Technical Breadth – Exposure to a wide variety of problem spaces, technologies.
• Very Strong System design and OO skills with a nifty ability to craft clean interfaces and operate at the right levels of abstraction.
• Solid coding skills with ability to drive teams through massive refactoring exercise & improve coding standards across large code bases.
• Good knowledge, understanding & experience of working with a large variety of multitier architectures. Awareness of pitfalls & use cases for a large variety of solutions.
• Good understanding & experience of high-performance web-scale & real-time response systems.
• Experience & exposure to a variety of large-scale persistent systems, including large databases.
• Exposure to complete product development cycles – From inception to production to scaling up, supporting new requirements, re-architectures - the Architects should have seen it all. Should have been part of scalable product development cycles.
• Excellent Mentoring skills – Be the technical mentor to the team.
• Must be comfortable working in fuzzy environments – where boundaries aren’t clearly defined.
• Previous Distinguished/chief architect or senior tech leadership experience in tech-focused firms.
• Familiarity with data analytics, AI/ML, and DevOps practices.
• Strong technical foundation in software architecture and full-stack.

Preferred Skills

• Previous Distinguished/chief architect or senior tech leadership experience in tech-focused firms.

Pay range and compensation package

80 - 100 LPA