Senior Product Architect ( Engineer + Product + Architecture), Cape Town

About The Role We’re looking for an exceptional

Product Architect

to own and shape our TymeX architecture. This isn’t an ivory tower role where you create perfect designs in isolation. You’ll be in action with product and engineering teams, making pragmatic technology decisions that balance speed, cost, and quality.

This role demands someone who can

think like a business owner and build like an engineer—someone who obsesses over simplicity, cost efficiency, and customer/business value. You’ll challenge expensive vendor solutions, advocate for building vs. buying when it makes sense, and constantly ask "is there a simpler, cheaper way to solve this?" You’ll live with your decisions through code reviews, incident responses, and operational feedback loops—ensuring your architectures aren’t just elegant on paper but resilient in production.

Please note that expat candidates will need to relocate to Ho Chi Minh City.

What You'll Do Drive Product&Business Value

Partner with Product Owners and Engineering to challenge requirements and solve real customer problems

Design with customer empathy—slow approvals lose customers, confusing flows increase defaults

Prioritize ruthlessly based on impact—simple solutions that ship fast beat "perfect" architectures that take months

Build lean, cost‑efficient systems for price‑sensitive markets

Lead Technical Architecture

Champion simplicity—systems any engineer can understand, question assumptions, and push for simpler, faster, cheaper solutions

Design secure, resilient, scalable architectures that handle peak loads and graceful failures

Bridge technology‑business gaps by translating complex concepts into clear business language

Enable&Grow Teams

Empower teams to make decisions—coach, don't command

Stay on the ground through code reviews to validate architectural assumptions

Pair with engineers during complex implementations and production incidents

Participate in post‑mortems and operational reviews—own and improve when designs cause issues

Mentor engineers to think architecturally and delegate decisions as teams mature

Foster psychological safety where teams challenge ideas and admit mistakes freely

Continuously Learn&Improve

Stay ahead of evolving technologies, industry best practices, and competitive landscapes

Question assumptions relentlessly—"We've always done it this way" is not a reason

Be intellectually honest: "This design is complex because I don't fully understand the problem yet"

Requirements What We're Looking For Engineering Foundation

8+ years in software engineering, especially backend systems (APIs, databases, message queues, distributed systems, event‑driven architectures)

Designed complex, distributed systems balancing consistency and availability, understanding trade‑offs between synchronous vs. asynchronous communication and strict vs. eventual consistency

Handled failure scenarios: network partitions, service outages, database failures—designing for graceful degradation

Experience with cloud‑native systems—AWS, Azure, or GCP, building cost‑efficient architectures

Strong understanding of relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases

DevSecOps experience—CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes/ECS), infrastructure‑as‑code, monitoring/observability, secure coding, OWASP basics

Product&Leadership

Product thinking: Track record of making technology decisions that drive business outcomes—faster time‑to‑market, lower costs, better customer experience

Customer empathy: Ability to articulate how technical decisions impact borrowers, analyzed customer feedback or support tickets

Cost‑conscious engineering: Experience optimizing for cost—choosing cheaper infrastructure, building instead of buying expensive SaaS, batching to reduce compute, caching to reduce database load

Simplicity advocate: Portfolio of simple, elegant solutions that delivered massive value, avoiding over‑engineering

Team enablement: Coaching and mentoring engineers, helping teams level up technical judgment and decision‑making autonomy

Cross‑functional collaboration: Comfortable working with Product, Credit Risk, Collections, Finance, Compliance, and Operations teams, translating between technical and business languages

Nice‑to‑have

AI/LLM engineer: Experience integrating large language models for chatbots, document processing, or decision assistance

Understanding of financial concepts: Transaction lifecycles, accounting, reconciliation, settlement

Programming languages: Java, Kotlin, Python

Frameworks: Spring ecosystem (most backend services are Spring‑based)

AWS services: ECS/EKS, Fargate, Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, MSK, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3

Our Engineering Principles

Simplicity over complexity: The best solution is the simplest one. Complexity is a tax—avoid it.

Lean over lavish: Cost‑efficient architectures that deliver value. Question every expense.

Pragmatism over perfection: Ship value iteratively. "Good enough" today beats "perfect" never.

Outcomes over outputs: Measure success by business impact (loans disbursed, defaults reduced, costs saved), not technical elegance.

Enablement over heroics: Make teams successful. Don’t be the lone genius solving every problem.

Learning over knowing: Admit when you don’t know. Experiment, fail fast, iterate.

Empathy over ego: Listen more than talk. Respect diverse perspectives. Assume positive intent.

Benefits

Meal and parking allowance are covered by the company

Full benefits and salary rank during probation

Insurances as Vietnamese labor law and premium health care for you and your family without seniority compulsory

Performance bonus up to 2 months

13th month salary pro-rata

15‑day annual leave + 3‑day sick leave + 1 birthday leave + 1 Christmas leave

SMART goals and clear career opportunities (technical seminars, conferences, career talks)– we focus on your development

Values‑driven, international working environment, and agile culture

Overseas travel opportunities for training and work related

Internal hackathons and company events (team building, coffee run, blue card…)

Work‑life balance 40‑hr per week from Mon to Fri

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at TymeX by 2x.

Seniority level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

Full‑time

Job function

Other

IT Services and IT Consulting

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