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Distinguished Software Architect Customer Experience

Austin, Remote

Self Financial is a venture-backed, high-growth FinTech company with a mission to increase economic inclusion and financial resilience by empowering people to build credit and build savings.

We're looking for people who share our passion and are driven to tackle challenges, find solutions and make the financial space better for the communities we serve.

Our team is passionate about challenging the status quo of the credit industry by providing people accessible tools to take control of their credit. Executing on our mission requires deep collaboration across our teams to ensure our products reach the people who can benefit from them the most, particularly the 100 million+ Americans who have no or low credit.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To that end, we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.

What You Will Do

As a Distinguished Software Architect focused primarily on our front-end platform, you will shape the long-term architectural vision and strategy for Self’s client applications and Backend for Frontend (BFF) microservices while maintaining enterprise-wide architectural coherence across the system.

You will be responsible for elevating the architecture of our client applications to enterprise scale, ensuring they are resilient, secure, performant, accessible, and adaptable for future growth. 

You will influence backend and platform decisions when they intersect with client applications, ensuring a clear boundary between backend systems dedicated to client applications and our other backend systems.

You will serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership and a mentor to architects and engineers across the organization, influencing through technical leadership rather than direct people management.

Strategic Architecture Leadership

  • Define and champion the enterprise front-end architecture strategy across client platforms and BFF microservices. Ensure we meet our business objectives through implementations that support maintainability, reliability, and scalability.
  • Lead and deliver complex, business-critical, cross-team initiatives, influencing both technical and organizational outcomes.
  • Establish standards in the client applications around design library, shared components, graphQL, web-analytics, experimentation, state management, and client observability. 
  • Ensure architectural coherence between BFF microservices and core backend microservices. Establish clear delineations of responsibilities between systems to support decoupled interfaces that allow for independent decoupled development.
  • Map and evolve our microservice architecture using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles, clarifying ownership and reducing coupling across front-end, BFF, and core backend systems.
  • Collaborate across engineering, product, DevOps, security, and data to define and govern architecture standards spanning APIs, data contracts, security, performance, observability, and deployment practices.
  • Lead and execute complex, business-critical, cross-team initiatives requiring enterprise-grade alignment across client, product, and platform systems.
  • Guide engineering direction through influence, collaboration, and deep technical expertise rather than formal authority.

Front-End Platform Excellence & Modernization

  • Lead the evolution of our front-end technology stack (e.g., React, TypeScript, Next.js or similar), ensuring maintainability, scalability, and a strong developer experience.
  • Architect scalable design systems and shared component libraries that enable consistency, accessibility (WCAG), and rapid product delivery across teams.
  • Help define and standardize a design library that supports a cohesive look and feel for components throughout our client applications.
  • Define standards for client application performance optimization (Core Web Vitals, bundle strategy, rendering patterns such as SSR/SSG/CSR), resilience, and client-side monitoring.
  • Establish secure client architecture standards, including authentication flows (OAuth/OIDC), session management, and protection against common vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, etc.).
  • Define testing and CI/CD strategies for front-end platform systems, including automated quality gates, preview environments, and release governance.

Cross-Domain & System Modernization

  • Partner with platform, data, and core backend teams to implement clean, versioned service interfaces that enable seamless integration with client applications.
  • Advocate for scalable architectural patterns across the full stack, ensuring front-end and core backend decisions are aligned and made with the future in mind.

Influence & Stakeholder Alignment

  • Align executives, product leaders, design leadership, and engineering managers around architectural standards and long-term client platform strategy.
  • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior executives, influencing investment decisions and long-range planning for customer-facing systems and enterprise platforms.
  • Facilitate architecture forums, guilds, and trainings that promote shared learning and cross-domain consistency.
  • Champion architectural excellence in large-scale programs, ensuring both enterprise integrity and exceptional customer experience.

Technical Stewardship & Mentorship

  • Act as a thought leader and mentor to Principal Engineers, Senior Architects, and Staff Engineers across both front-end and backend domains.
  • Foster a culture of technical excellence, accessibility, performance awareness, and architectural rigor.
  • Identify and evaluate emerging front-end technologies, frameworks, and industry trends while maintaining disciplined governance standards.
  • Establish scalable architectural governance practices that balance innovation with enterprise stability and risk management.

What You’ll Have

  • 12+ years of progressive experience in software architecture and system design, with demonstrated impact across multiple domains and large-scale distributed systems.
  • Deep expertise in Domain-Driven Design (DDD), microservice architecture, and API-driven ecosystems; proven ability to decompose and modernize complex legacy systems.
  • Experience with python and/or javascript microservices. 
  • Experience with postgres and AWS.
  • Experience with web and app frameworks like react and react native.
  • Broad, hands-on knowledge across the modern technology stack - covering cloud-native platforms, data infrastructure, event-driven systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling.
  • Proven success in leading and delivering complex, business-critical, cross-team initiatives, influencing both technical and organizational outcomes.
  • Demonstrated success in defining and governing architecture standards and frameworks at an enterprise scale.
  • Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction at the executive level.
  • Proven leadership in building technical alignment across multiple teams and mentoring senior engineers and architects.
  • A strategic mindset with the ability to balance technical rigor with business outcomes.
  • Strong track record of translating architectural vision into measurable engineering and business results.

Base salary is $164,000-243,000 annually.  Individual pay is based on factors unique to each candidate, including skill set, experience, location, and other job-related reasons.

Benefits and Perks:

We have the compensation and benefits you expect. But there's one thing that Self Financial can offer that many companies cannot: we can positively change the world, while making a profit. We are a team of Builders, empowering our customers to build their dreams. We have a Do the Right Thing ethos in all that we do, and we hope you value that approach, too. 

Our perks include:

  • Company equity in the form of Stock Options
  • Performance-based bonuses
  • Generous employer-paid health, vision and dental insurance coverage
  • Flexible vacation policy
  • Educational assistance
  • Free gym membership
  • Casual dress code
  • Team building events and activities
  • Remote work arrangements/ flexible work schedule
  • Paid parental leave 

Self Financial requires all employees hired to successfully pass a background check.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

At this time, we are only able to consider applicants who are U.S. Citizens or Green Card Holders for employment opportunities. We appreciate your understanding.

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