The Architect at TestReach is responsible for defining and evolving the technical architecture of the TestReach platform, ensuring it is scalable, secure, resilient and aligned with long-term business objectives.
This role provides architectural leadership across engineering teams, guiding design decisions, reviewing implementations and ensuring consistency in standards and best practices. The Architect plays a critical role in balancing innovation, delivery speed, technical debt and long-term platform sustainability in a high-stakes online assessment environment.
This is a highly technical, hands-on role requiring deep architectural expertise and the ability to influence across distributed teams.
- Define and maintain the target architecture for the TestReach platform.
- Establish architectural principles, standards and design patterns.
- Ensure alignment between product strategy and technical direction.
- Identify and mitigate architectural risks that may impact scalability or security.
- Contribute to long-term technical roadmap planning.
- Ensure the platform supports high-volume, high-stakes exam sittings with strong uptime and performance.
- Lead architectural decisions relating to performance, resilience and disaster recovery.
- Embed security-by-design principles across systems.
- Validate non-functional requirements (NFRs) including performance, availability, scalability and compliance.
- Review and approve major technical designs and implementation approaches.
- Provide guidance on complex architectural challenges and trade-offs.
- Support engineering teams in resolving deep technical issues.
- Promote consistency in engineering standards, documentation and code quality.
- Help manage and reduce technical debt strategically.
- Lead decisions relating to cloud architecture and infrastructure design.
- Ensure best practices in CI/CD, observability, monitoring and deployment patterns.
- Guide infrastructure scalability and automation strategies.
- Evaluate and recommend tooling, frameworks and platforms.
- Define data architecture standards, including data flow, storage and governance.
- Support integration architecture for enterprise clients and partner systems.
- Ensure secure and efficient API design and external system connectivity.
- Advise on data security, encryption and compliance requirements.
- Provide blueprint designs and strategic guidance on embedding AI/ML capabilities directly into our product suites, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure and seamlessly integrated into the core application logic.
- Define the standards, rules and best practices for teams utilizing AI code generation tools (e.g., Cline, Open Router); mentor engineers on prompt engineering, code verification and maintaining high software quality in an AI-assisted development workflow.
- Architect and oversee the integration of AI evaluation, automated testing and model validation steps directly into our CI/CD pipelines, ensuring safe, continuous and compliant deployment of both software and AI artifacts.
- Act as the subject matter expert to upskill traditional software engineers in AI/ML concepts, bridging the gap between data science models and robust production-grade software engineering.
- Establish architectural guardrails for monitoring AI performance, data privacy, model drift and cost optimization, coaching engineering teams on how to build observability into every AI-powered feature.
- Work closely with Product, Engineering and Project Management to align architecture with delivery plans.
- Act as a technical escalation point for complex design challenges.
- Communicate architectural vision and decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Support pre-sales or enterprise discussions where architectural input is required.
- Ability to design long-term scalable solutions while enabling short-term delivery.
- Deep technical credibility with the ability to influence engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and platform design.
- Identifies and mitigates architectural and operational risks proactively.
- Works effectively across global, distributed teams.
- Balances ideal architecture with business realities and timelines.
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field. A Master's degree is advantageous.
- 8–10 years in software engineering, with significant experience in architectural roles.
- Proven experience designing and evolving SaaS or cloud-native platforms.
- Experience operating in high-availability, security-sensitive environments.
- Strong background in distributed systems and scalable infrastructure.
- Experience guiding engineering teams across multiple time zones or distributed structures.
- Experience in EdTech, secure testing platforms, or regulated SaaS environments.
- Experience supporting enterprise-scale integrations.
- Exposure to large-scale platform modernisation or transformation initiatives.
- Deep knowledge of modern software architecture (microservices, event-driven systems, APIs).
- Strong cloud architecture experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
- Expertise in scalability, performance optimisation and resilience patterns.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and DevOps practices.
- Strong understanding of data architecture (SQL/NoSQL, caching, data pipelines).
- Knowledge of security frameworks, encryption standards and compliance considerations.
- Familiarity with observability, monitoring and performance tooling.
