Backend Architect

We are seeking an Architect for Tekion Automotive Marketing Cloud (TAMC), a fully AI-native product built to solve the marketing and advertising needs of automotive industry partners. TAMC is one of Tekion's most strategic new product lines, and this role is central to its success. This role is focused on designing scalable, resilient, and high-performance systems that power complex business workflows and enable intelligent product capabilities. You will architect end-to-end backend services across Java-based microservices, event-driven data pipelines, caching and serving layers such as Redis/Aerospike, and integration patterns that connect AI/ML capabilities to domain services. The role also requires defining clean architectural boundaries and hexagonal adapter patterns so that AI integrations, model-serving components, and external intelligence layers can be incorporated without tightly coupling backend business logic to infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build scalable backend systems using Java-based technologies and distributed architectures.
• Own the architecture and technical design of backend components and services across the full software development lifecycle.
• Drive backend architecture decisions focused on scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and performance.
• Build and review high-quality production-grade code and establish engineering best practices across teams.
• Design and implement robust APIs, service contracts, and microservices frameworks for enterprise-grade applications.
• Solve system bottlenecks and optimise backend performance, including latency, throughput, resilience, and availability.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, QA, and other cross-functional teams to deliver business-critical backend capabilities.
• Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance to engineers across teams.
• Support deployment, observability, and operational excellence through strong practices in CI/CD, monitoring, debugging, and production support.
• Ensure backend platforms are designed to support future extensibility, including integrations with AI/ML or intelligent services where relevant.
• Deliver high-quality solutions in a fast-paced, execution-focused environment.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep focus on backend development and architecture.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Java and backend frameworks such as Spring / Spring Boot.
• Proven experience designing and scaling distributed systems and microservices-based architectures.
• Strong understanding of: backend system design, API design, multithreading and concurrency, data structures and algorithms, database design, caching strategies, event-driven systems, performance tuning
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency, resilient backend services in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architecture, containerization, and modern deployment practices.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, observability, logging, monitoring, and production operations.
• Experience working with relational and NoSQL databases.
• Proven ability to drive architecture reviews, code quality, and engineering best practices.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with the ability to work across product and engineering teams.
• Currently hands-on with production code.

Good to Have:

• Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Aerospike, or similar backend/platform technologies.
• Familiarity with integrating backend systems with AI/GenAI capabilities, such as LLM-based services, recommendation systems, or intelligent scoring engines.
• Understanding of architectural patterns that keep backend domain services decoupled from external intelligence layers.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Skills

distributed systems, java, microservices, spring, spring boot