Principal Architect

Role overview

The Principal Architect is a senior, highly hands-on individual contributor responsible for setting the long-range architecture, technical direction, and standards for a mission-critical lending, data, and customer value platform. The role combines deep expertise across software, platform, and data architecture with the ability to guide and influence several engineering teams so that all domains operate within a single, scalable, resilient, and secure enterprise design.

The position reports to the Director, Technology Delivery and is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

What you will drive

• Shape and advocate the platform’s future-state architecture and technical standards across software engineering, platform engineering, and data architecture.
• Put governance in place so architectural decisions remain consistent, secure, maintainable, and built for scale.
• Promote best practices across DevOps, cloud, and data architecture, with strong emphasis on resilience and data integrity.
• Work closely with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to convert product intent into practical architectural plans and delivery approaches.
• Contribute directly to critical production code and mentor engineers while helping solve the hardest technical issues.

Impact of the role

This role is central to keeping the core platform architecturally sound as the business grows. Success in this position should reduce technical debt, strengthen reliability, and speed up delivery of new business capabilities. Key measures include stable, high-performing Java and Clojure systems, along with thoughtful adoption of advanced patterns such as AI-enabled solutions and cloud-native architecture.

Key responsibilities

• Partner with the CTO, Director of Technology Delivery, and engineering managers to define, communicate, and execute the technology strategy and architectural roadmap.
• Lead architecture design and review for major platform programs.
• Coach and mentor engineers to build stronger technical discipline and engineering quality.
• Set technology standards, engineering practices, and security expectations for the wider team.
• Encourage rigorous development habits such as test-driven development and secure coding.
• Run detailed code and design reviews with a strong focus on quality, maintainability, and security.
• Evaluate and help introduce emerging technologies and modern engineering practices, including AI-related approaches.
• Guide the move toward service-oriented design, event-driven architectures, and scalable data platforms.
• Work with Platform Engineering on infrastructure strategy, containerisation, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Review significant technical designs to ensure they fit the long-term system direction and business goals.
• Design for high availability, fault tolerance, and security across the stack.
• Lead data modelling, data architecture, and datastore evolution to preserve integrity, quality, and performance at scale.
• Identify and address architectural risk and technical debt before it becomes systemic.
• Support delivery teams with architectural clarity and hands-on guidance to remove blockers and improve speed.
• Write production code in critical architectural areas and other complex scenarios such as shared libraries, domain logic, and performance-sensitive components.

Qualifications and experience

• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• At least 10 years of professional experience spanning software development, cloud, DevOps, and architecture, including a minimum of 3 years designing large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong practical experience with several programming languages.
• Proven ability to design and operate large-scale event-driven, service-based architectures.
• Ability to define and enforce engineering practices such as TDD and clean code standards.
• Experience with multiple data storage models, including relational and NoSQL systems, plus related modelling techniques.
• Advanced working knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps, containerisation, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Excellent communication and influence skills, with evidence of leading complex technical decisions across multiple teams.

Preferred background

• Strong technical depth in Java and Spring Boot.
• Exposure to Clojure or other functional programming languages, either hands-on or at architectural level.
• Experience with data architecture, data warehousing concepts, and ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Working knowledge of monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack.
• Experience in a regulated FinTech or financial services environment.

What kind of person will succeed here

• A strategic architecture thinker who can define the future system design from concept to production-ready execution.
• A technology leader who can translate Ezra’s digital lending mission into a clear and durable technical roadmap.
• A hands-on expert who can own complex architecture work end-to-end and still support engineering teams in implementation.
• A strong collaborator who can align engineering leaders and product managers around shared architecture decisions.
• A quality-focused professional who can review and approve complex designs for scalability, resilience, and security.
• Someone who actively manages platform risk and helps define how risks are categorised and addressed.
• An advocate for engineering excellence, performance, and consistent standards across teams.
• A person who keeps up with industry change and can introduce new capabilities such as AI and cloud-native tooling without compromising stability.

Company overview

Ezra delivers B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets through partnerships with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. The company supports 24 operations across 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, with main offices in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Its flagship products include Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano, and BNPL. ACS provides airtime or data advances to prepaid mobile subscribers when credit runs low. Nano offers micro cash advances to mobile wallet users on demand. BNPL supports instalment-based payments for products and services.

The business is fully driven by technology and data, including subscriber eligibility checks, offer generation, risk management, loan issuance, recovery, performance optimisation, reporting, reconciliation, and billing. The platform processes about 21 million loan requests and 1.4 TB of data every day across its markets, so reliability, robustness, and security are essential. The company is also exploring additional ways to use platform and transactional data to improve existing products and create new opportunities.

Additional information

Reports to: Director, Technology Delivery

Location: Nairobi, Kenya