Job Description
To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment. What You'll Do: OCC’s Platform Architecture team is responsible for the infrastructure, cloud, networking, compute, storage, and observability tooling that critical market functions depend on. The Principal, Platform Architecture is a senior individual contributor who defines the technical direction for OCC’s core platform capabilities — owning how we build, deploy, operate, and evolve the infrastructure layer across both legacy and cloud-native environments. This is a hands-on architecture role with enterprise-wide impact. You will lead POC efforts, drive platform standards adoption, and serve as the senior technical voice on platform concerns across programs including the Renaissance/Ovation transformation. You will work closely with Application Architecture, Engineering, Security, and operations teams to ensure the platform is a resilient, scalable foundation — not a bottleneck. Primary Duties and Responsibilities: To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily. Define and Own Platform Architecture Lead architecture design and decision-making for OCC’s core platform capabilities: container orchestration, streaming infrastructure, cloud architecture, CI/CD and GitOps pipelines, and observability Develop and maintain target-state platform architectures with clear transition plans from current state Own reference architectures for Kubernetes-based workloads, Kafka streaming topologies, Flink stream processing, and AWS infrastructure patterns Establish platform architecture standards and guardrails that application teams can build against reliably Ensure non-functional requirements — availability, latency, throughput, recoverability — are addressed at the platform level, not delegated to individual application teams Drive Platform Modernization Architect and guide migration of workloads to cloud-native patterns on AWS, including compute, networking, storage, and security services Define OCC’s GitOps model — infrastructure-as-code practices, pipeline standards, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale Evaluate and recommend platform technologies and tooling; lead proof-of-concept efforts to validate architectural decisions before commitment Identify and reduce platform risk across the portfolio — single points of failure, unsupported dependencies, capacity constraints, and operational gaps Collaborate and Influence Partner with Application Architecture to ensure platform capabilities match application design requirements — particularly for high-throughput, low-latency clearing workloads Engage Engineering and operations teams to ensure platform designs are buildable, operable, and supportable — not just theoretically sound Facilitate architecture working sessions with technical leads and business stakeholders; communicate platform decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences Raise the Bar on Resilience and Operability Establish observability standards — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — as a platform-level capability, not an afterthought Define capacity planning and performance engineering practices for platform infrastructure Participate in incident reviews and post-mortems; translate operational findings into durable platform architecture improvements Ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC’s regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles Supervisory Responsibilities: None Qualifications: The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions. Required 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture roles with demonstrated ownership of enterprise-scale platform decisions Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes — cluster architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operational patterns at scale Hands-on experience architecting Apache Kafka deployments — topic design, partitioning strategy, consumer group patterns, schema management, and operational concerns Practical experience with Apache Flink or equival