Senior Vice President - Chief Architect - Software Engineering

• *Role :** Chief Technical Architect

• *Reporting :** CTO

• *Location:** Bengaluru

About Us

PayU, one of India's leading digital financial services providers with Prosus as an investor, operates businesses that are regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and offers advanced solutions to meet the digital payment requirements of the Indian market. PayU India companies aim to create a full\-stack digital financial services platform to serve all (tapped and untapped) financial needs of customers through technology solutions.

PayU provides payment gateway solutions to online businesses through its cutting\-edge and award\-winning technology. PayU is one of the leading payment gateways in India \& has empowered 5 lakhs\+ businesses, including leading enterprises, e\-commerce giants and SMBs. It enables businesses to collect digital payments across 150\+ online payment methods such as Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Net Banking, EMIs, BNPL, QR, UPI, Wallets, and more. It is a preferred partner in the affordability ecosystem, offering the maximum coverage of issuers \& easy to implement integrations across card\-based EMIs, pay later options and new\-age card\-less EMIs. PayU offers merchants best in industry success rates while ensuring a seamless checkout experience.

Role Description

Lead and scale the architecture organization to design and deliver an AI‑native, cloud‑agnostic platform spanning Payments, Wibmo, and future ventures/acquisitions. Establish the foundation for hypergrowth through scalable, secure, and interoperable capabilities. The ideal candidate blends deep engineering excellence with sharp opportunity\-sensing and end‑to‑end execution.

Key Responsibilities

Define enterprise and portfolio architecture (app, data/AI, integration, security, cloud) with composable capabilities/PBCs for Payments, Wibmo

• *Lead AI\-first architecture:** ML Ops /LLM Ops, feature stores, vector search/RAG, real\-time inference, evaluation/guardrails, responsible AI, model observability and governance

• *Own data strategy:** streaming\-first (Kafka/Pulsar), CDC, data contracts, lineage, quality, privacy\-by\-design; unify batch \+ real\-time for decisioning

• *Modernize the payments stack:** event\-driven microservices, idempotency/exactly\-once, tokenization, ledgers, multi\-tenant isolation, high throughput/low latency patterns

• *Reliability at scale:** multi\-region active\-active, SLOs/error budgets, chaos engineering, backpressure/circuit breaking, autoscaling, eBPF /Open Telemetry\-based observability

• *Platform engineering \& DevEx:** Internal Developer Platform, golden paths, CI/CD, policy\-as\-code (OPA), ephemeral envs, runtime standards, API\-first/Async API

• *Security \& compliance:** zero trust, KMS/HSM, secrets management, threat modelling, PCI DSS v4\.0, compliance\-as\-code, SBOM, supply\-chain hardening

• *Governance that accelerates:** ADRs/RFCs, reference architectures, scorecards, cost/perf/latency budgets, FinOps

• *Talent \& leadership:** hire/mentor architects and SMEs, establish guilds, raise the bar; partner with product/engineering to turn strategy into executable roadmaps

Ideal Experience

15\+ years building and scaling mission\-critical, high\-throughput, low\-latency platforms

Deep payments/fintech; plus, exposure to one or more of travel, telecom, e\-commerce

Proven delivery of AI/ML and GenAI to production at scale (ML Ops/LLM Ops, guardrails, monitoring, governance)

• *Cloud\-native architecture:** Kubernetes, service mesh, event\-driven systems, APIs; OLTP/OLAP, caching, NoSQL/relational, streaming, lakehouse

Strong backend fundamentals; Python preferred (plus Java/Go/Scala a plus)

Security/compliance in regulated environments; privacy engineering and data governance

Excellent stakeholder influence; hands\-on, clear technical writing, DDD/event storming