Software Engineering Architect

Role Overview

• Create 3-year roadmaps aligning Line of Business strategic and tactical needs with modern enterprise architecture.
• Define and maintain application architecture standards and patterns consistent with MetLife best practices.
• Own reporting for Enterprise Application Inventory.
• Contribute to broader MetLife Enterprise Architecture community in developing standards and supporting architectural governance.
• Lead migration strategy from monolithic applications to a microservice architecture, ensuring modularity, scalability, faster/parallel development cycles, easier roll-back and patching, and reduced deployment risk.
• Embed automated remediation in application architecture: actions such as container restarts, failover, or scaling executed via orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes) must be factored into future state designs.
• Create application resilience by design: future state architectures must have built-in redundancy, be fault-tolerant, and support “self-healing” by leveraging continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and rule-driven automated responses.
• Design solutions using ReactJS for front-end, Django for back-end, and PostgreSQL for persistence.
• Define API-driven architecture and REST/GraphQL integration.
• Design secure, performant communication between client and server.
• Embed authentication flows (JWT, OAuth) and session management.
• Establish UI/UX guidelines leveraging Material UI for consistency and accessibility.
• Create component-based designs and UI/UX best practices.
• Design scalable, reusable UI components aligned with enterprise branding.
• Embed state management (Redux, Context API) and performance optimization for large-scale apps.
• Define application data architectures that support downstream business intelligence and analytics.
• Apply advanced SQL, indexing, and query optimization.
• Support data modeling for relational systems and handling of large datasets.
• Implement ACID compliance (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated Durable) transaction architecture, and scalability strategies.
• Ensure data models and workflows enable transaction auditability and compliance reporting.
• Embed data governance principles into application design to maintain integrity and traceability across services.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand product and service offerings.
• Translate business processes into data-driven rules and automated workflows.
• Ensure architecture supports business intelligence, analytics, and decision automation.
• Ensure seamless integration with enterprise systems, APIs, and third-party services.
• Define API-first design principles and implement secure, reusable services.
• Implement best practices for application security, including OWASP standards.
• Optimize application performance across front-end and back-end layers.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Mentor developers on architectural principles, microservices design, and coding standards.
• Enforce coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, MIS, or equivalent required.
• 10+ years’ experience building web applications, ideally with experience in both small and large companies.
• Prior experience in Microservices Architecture.
• Ability to break up larger application repositories into microservices.
• Prior significant exposure to MaterialUI / ReactJS, Django ORM / Framework, PostgreSQL / Redshift.
• Prior experience in software development and systems architecture.
• Experience leading enterprise system architecture and interfacing with product and design functions.
• Ability to effectively cross-collaborate with internal and external stakeholders.
• Familiarity with modern web development tools and frameworks, including AWS and Azure.

Tech Stack

• Amazon Redshift
• AWS
• Azure
• Django
• GraphQL
• Kubernetes
• Material UI
• Microservices
• Postgres
• React
• Redux
• SQL