Software Architecture - Sr Advisor I

Calling all innovators – find your future at Fiserv. We’re Fiserv, a global leader in Fintech and payments, and we move money and information in a way that moves the world. We connect financial institutions, corporations, merchants, and consumers to one another millions of times a day – quickly, reliably, and securely. Any time you swipe your credit card, pay through a mobile app, or withdraw money from the bank, we’re involved. If you want to make an impact on a global scale, come make a difference at Fiserv. Job Title Software Architecture - Sr Advisor I Role Overview Finxact is an innovative, enterprise-class, 100 percent open API, cloud-native banking platform and transaction processing engine. It is designed to support banking, fintech, and embedded finance organizations with a highly scalable, resilient, and adaptable technology platform. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer – Event Messaging to provide technical leadership in the design, development, and evolution of Finxact’s event-driven platform and messaging capabilities. This role combines hands-on software engineering with architecture and technical leadership across highly distributed, event-driven systems. You will help define and implement scalable messaging patterns and services using Golang, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, REST, gRPC, and cloud-native technologies. You will work across engineering teams to improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and operability of our eventing platform while establishing architectural standards and engineering practices for asynchronous communication. Experience with change data capture technologies, including CDC and Debezium, is highly valuable for this role. Responsibilities  Design, develop, and evolve highly scalable, resilient, and maintainable event-driven services and messaging platform capabilities.  Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance for distributed systems and event-driven application architectures. Develop production services and platform components using Golang. Design and implement scalable event streaming and messaging solutions using Apache Kafka.  Define architectural patterns and engineering standards for producers, consumers, topics, schemas, event contracts, retries, error handling, and message processing. Design solutions that account for ordering, delivery guarantees, idempotency, backpressure, failure recovery, and distributed-system failure scenarios. Develop APIs and supporting services using REST and gRPC where appropriate.  Collaborate with application, platform, database, and architecture teams to integrate event-driven capabilities across the Finxact platform. Design, deploy, and operate containerized services within Kubernetes environments. Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation to support reliable and repeatable delivery of messaging services. Analyze performance, scalability, and reliability characteristics of event-driven systems and identify opportunities for improvement. Troubleshoot complex production issues involving event processing, service communication, Kafka, databases, and distributed systems. Establish observability practices for messaging platforms, including metrics, logging, tracing, lag monitoring, and operational alerting. Participate in architecture reviews, technical design sessions, code reviews, and performance analysis. Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance on Golang, Kafka, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native development. Influence technical direction across teams and drive consistency in messaging architecture and engineering practices. Required Qualifications 7+ years of professional software development experience designing, developing, and supporting production software systems. Significant experience with software architecture, technical design, and technical leadership for complex distributed systems. 5+ years of Golang development experience building production applications, services, or platform components. Strong experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures. Strong production experience with Apache Kafka, including producers, consumers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, retention, and delivery semantics. Experience designing messaging systems for scalability, resiliency, throughput, availability, and failure recovery. Strong understanding of distributed-system concepts including concurrency, consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, backpressure, and asynchronous processing. Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and gRPC services. Strong experience with Kubernetes and containerized application architectures, including deployment, scaling, configuration, resiliency, and troubleshooting. Experience integrating applications with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. Experience operating applications and distributed services in AWS, Azure, GCP, or similar cloud environments. Experience with automated testing, integration testing, performance testing, observability, and production troubleshooting. Ability to translate business and product requirements into scalable technical solutions. Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate architectural decisions and technical tradeoffs across engineering teams and technology leadership. Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education, work, and/or military experience. Preferred Experience Change Data Capture (CDC) architectures and patterns. Debezium for database change streaming and event generation. Kafka Connect and connector-based integration architectures. Designing high-volume, low-latency messaging or transaction-processing platforms. Event schemas, schema evolution, compatibility strategies, and schema registries. Designing replay, retry, dead-letter, and recovery strategie