<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">The Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect at OpenFX owns the design and integrity of a payments and FX platform that must operate across multiple geographic regions and cloud environments without compromising on availability, data sovereignty, latency, or regulatory compliance. This is not a role that designs architecture in the abstract. You are responsible for decisions that determine whether a settlement clears in London during an AWS eu-west-1 degradation, whether a client in the UAE can transact without their data leaving the region, and whether OpenFX can migrate between cloud providers without a full platform rewrite.</p>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Cross-border payments and FX are inherently distributed problems. Transactions originate in one jurisdiction, clear through correspondent networks in another, and settle in a third. The infrastructure that supports this must match that complexity with equivalent architectural rigour. You are the person who ensures it does.</p>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">You operate at the intersection of distributed systems engineering, cloud infrastructure, and financial regulatory compliance. You work closely with the Principal Architect, Platform team, pod-level Tech Leads, and the Security and Compliance functions to define standards, validate designs, and resolve the hardest architectural trade-offs the organisation faces.</p>
<hr class="border-border-200 border-t-0.5 my-3 mx-1.5">
<h4 class="text-text-100 mt-2 -mb-1 text-base font-bold">Key Skills</h4>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Distributed Systems & Cloud Architecture</strong></p>
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<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Deep expertise in multi-region application design: active-active and active-passive topologies, global load balancing, regional failover, and cross-region replication strategies</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Strong hands-on experience with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear understanding of where provider capabilities diverge in ways that matter for financial workloads</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Proficiency in cloud-agnostic infrastructure patterns: Kubernetes (multi-cluster federation, cross-region networking), service mesh architectures, and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Pulumi)</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Solid understanding of networking fundamentals at scale: BGP, Anycast, CDN strategies, private interconnects, and east-west traffic management across regions</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Familiarity with distributed data consistency models: eventual consistency, strong consistency trade-offs, CRDTs, and conflict resolution strategies in globally distributed databases</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Financial Domain & Compliance Architecture</strong></p>
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<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Understanding of data residency and sovereignty requirements across key OpenFX operating jurisdictions: UAE (ADGM / DFSA), UK (FCA), EU (GDPR / PSD2), and other relevant frameworks</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Ability to design data partitioning and routing architectures that enforce jurisdictional boundaries without fragmenting the platform into isolated silos</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Familiarity with financial infrastructure concepts: payment rail latency, settlement finality, FX liquidity provider connectivity, and correspondent banking dependencies</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Experience ensuring audit logging, data lineage, and access controls work coherently across multi-cloud, multi-region environments</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Engineering Craft & Architecture Practice</strong></p>
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<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Ability to produce ADRs, reference architectures, and design documents that are precise enough for engineers to implement from and clear enough for product and compliance to validate against</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Strong systems thinking: able to reason about failure modes, blast radius, and cascade effects in complex distributed systems</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Experience running architecture review processes across multiple independent teams</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Collaboration & Communication</strong></p>
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<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Communicates complex architectural constraints and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Influences through reasoning and evidence, not authority; builds consensus across pod-level Tech Leads and EMs</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Comfortable operating with significant ambiguity at the frontier of what the platform needs to become</li>
</ul>
<hr class="border-border-200 border-t-0.5 my-3 mx-1.5">
<h4 class="text-text-100 mt-2 -mb-1 text-base font-bold">Roles & Responsibilities</h4>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Multi-Region Architecture Design & Ownership</strong></p>
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<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Define and maintain the reference architecture for multi-region deployment: traffic routing, data replication, failover behaviour, and regional isolation boundaries</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Own architectural decisions that govern how services are deployed, scaled, and failed over across regions; ensure those decisions are documented and revisited as the platform evolves</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Design for regional independence: the ability to isolate a region for regulatory or operational reasons without degrading global capability</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Define standards for how new services must be designed to operate in a multi-region context from day one, not as a retrofit</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Multi-Cloud Strategy & Portability</strong></p>
<ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Maintain an architecture that avoids hard coupling to any single cloud provider for critical platform functions</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Evaluate where to leverage managed cloud services versus cloud-agnostic alternatives, with explicit reasoning about portability, cost, and operational overhead</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Lead design of abstraction layers and platform primitives (with the Platform pod) that allow services to run across cloud environments without service-level re-engineering</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Define and test cloud provider failover runbooks; ensure provider-level degradation can be responded to within defined RTO and RPO targets</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Data Sovereignty & Regulatory Architecture</strong></p>
<ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Design data routing, storage, and processing architectures that enforce jurisdictional data residency requirements across all regions OpenFX operates in</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Work with Compliance and Legal to translate regulatory obligations into concrete architectural constraints enforced at infrastructure and application layer</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Define the data classification framework for multi-region environments: what replicates globally, what stays regionally isolated, what requires explicit consent to move</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Ensure observability infrastructure produces the evidence needed to demonstrate data residency compliance to regulators</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Platform Reliability & Resilience</strong></p>
<ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Define availability and resilience targets; ensure the architecture is designed to meet them under realistic failure scenarios, not just nominal conditions</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Lead chaos engineering and failure mode analysis exercises to validate that failover, replication, and multi-cloud fallback behave as designed</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Own the observability architecture across multi-region, multi-cloud deployments: unified logging, distributed tracing, and alerting that works coherently regardless of where workloads run</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Establish SLO / SLA frameworks that reflect the availability and latency commitments OpenFX makes to clients and liquidity providers</li>
</ul>
<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Cross-Team Architecture Governance</strong></p>
<ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Conduct architecture reviews for significant features, integrations, and infrastructure changes across all pods; ensure multi-region and multi-cloud implications are addressed before build begins</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Maintain and evolve the ADR library; ensure decisions are current and discoverable by engineers across the organisation</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Work with pod Tech Leads to identify and address architectural drift where production systems have deviated from intended design</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Contribute to the Platform pod's roadmap: identify shared infrastructure investments that reduce the cost of multi-region operation for all pods</li>
</ul>
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<h4 class="text-text-100 mt-2 -mb-1 text-base font-bold">What Success Looks Like</h4>
<ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">A regional cloud provider degradation does not cause a platform-wide outage; failover occurs within defined targets and clients are not materially impacted</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">OpenFX can demonstrate to regulators in any operating jurisdiction that client data complies with local residency requirements, backed by architecture rather than manual controls</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Pod engineers have clear standards for building multi-region-ready features and do not re-solve distributed systems problems that have already been solved at the platform level</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">The platform is not locked to any single cloud provider; a migration decision can be executed as an operational programme, not an architectural rewrite</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Architecture reviews are seen as a quality accelerator by engineering teams, not a bottleneck</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">You are the person the organisation turns to when the hardest infrastructure trade-offs need to be resolved, and you resolve them with clarity and evidence</li>
</ul>
