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
Requirements
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 equivalent stream processing frameworks - job design, state management, and deployment on Kubernetes
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing GitOps pipelines - infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, secrets management, and release automati
Additional Information
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.
Theocc · Chicago - 125 S Franklin