Position overview

We’re looking for a Solution Architect to join our engineering function, reporting directly to the CTO. At Xapo, we are building truly cross-functional teams with full ownership of design, architecture, building, testing, delivery, data, and operations, structured as Stream Aligned Teams (SATs), Platform teams and Enabling teams as per Team Topologies. You will collaborate closely with engineering leaders and the SRE function, as well as fellow members of the product, apps, and design.

This is a deeply hands-on role. You will not sit on top of an ivory tower drawing boxes and arrows, you will write code, build production-grade Proofs of Concept and demonstrate what good looks like by example. You will own the Architectural Advice Forum (AAF), facilitating decentralised architectural decisions captured as ADRs without becoming a bottleneck or single point of approval.

You will be the CTO’s partner on AI strategy, drive standardisation across backend, web and mobile engineering, and work closely with our SRE team on reliability, observability and platform concerns.

This is an opportunity to shape how a regulated crypto bank designs, builds and operates software, having a real impact on how the future of finance looks.

Responsibilities

• Own and facilitate the Architectural Advice Forum (AAF), driving decentralised decision-making that is captured as ADRs. The forum is yours, the challenge is expected, but you are not “single” approver of every architectural change, the goal is for decisions to be made as close to the teams doing the work as possible.
• Personally build production-grade Proofs of Concept to de-risk new patterns, validate architectural ideas and demonstrate “what good looks like” ahead of broader adoption.
• Partner with the CTO on Xapo’s AI strategy, identifying high-value opportunities, evaluating tooling, prototyping solutions and helping engineering teams adopt AI responsibly across the SDLC and our customer-facing products.
• Own cross-cutting standardisation across backend, web and mobile engineering, patterns, paradigms, observability, security, testing and delivery, so that quality and velocity scale together.
• Define and uphold the engineering quality bar across backend, web and mobile, covering testing, code review, observability, security, performance and production-readiness, and lead by example through your own POCs and code reviews
• Embed Security-First Architecture across everything we build. For a regulated crypto bank, security is not a checkbox or a separate workstream, it is the DNA of our products. You will set the threat-modelling, secure-by-default and defence-in-depth patterns that every team builds against, and partner with our Security function to evolve them as our risk surface grows.
• Champion Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture as foundations for how we model our domain and evolve our systems.
• Work closely with the SRE team on reliability, capacity, incident response, observability and the evolution of our internal developer platform.
• Coach and mentor engineers across SATs, platform and enabling teams, leading through inspiration and influence rather than authority, and helping the whole organisation raise its architectural bar.
• Surface and unblock systemic technical risks, technical debt and cross-team dependencies before they hit production.
• Maintain Xapo’s engineering principles and Tech Radar, and contribute to architecture-relevant aspects of regulatory, security and risk conversations.
• Build a great place to work for talented and motivated people, and help develop innovative solutions with Bitcoin at their core.

Skills needed

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in an Architect, Staff or equivalent senior-IC role.
• A strong track record as a hands-on engineer-turned-architect: you still read, write and review production code regularly, and you enjoy doing so. The role is language-agnostic, we care how you think, not which language you write, though familiarity with our primary stack is a plus.
• Deep experience designing, building and operating distributed, event-driven systems in production, ideally at scale and under regulatory scrutiny.
• Hands-on experience with Domain-Driven Design, both strategic (bounded contexts, context mapping) and tactical patterns.
• Practical familiarity with decentralised architectural governance, Architectural Advice Forum, RFCs and ADRs, and a clear point of view on why architectural decisions should be made close to the teams doing the work.
• Demonstrated ability to lead by influence rather than authority: you have inspired engineers to adopt good practices because they wanted to, not because they were told to.
• Experience working in regulated fintech, payments or banking environments, with an appreciation for the constraints that come with serving customers’ money.
• Deep experience designing security-first architectures, threat modelling, secure-by-default patterns, defence in depth, identity, key and secret management, in environments where a breach has material business and regulatory consequences.
• A strong perspective on modern AI/ML, LLMs, agents and applied AI in production, and how to integrate them responsibly into engineering workflows and customer-facing products.
• Excellent written and verbal communication: you can write a crisp ADR, run an effective architecture review, present to engineers and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architecture, microservices, container-based 12-factor apps and patterns around fault tolerance, security and resilience.
• Strong CI/CD, automated testing (unit, service and end-to-end) and overall SDLC practices.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience in crypto, Web3, custody or blockchain-based systems.
• Familiarity with Team Topologies and how Stream Aligned, Platform and Enabling teams interact in practice.
• Multi-platform standardisation experience spanning backend, web and mobile.
• Background contributing to SRE or platform engineering work, SLOs, error budgets, developer experience.
• Open-source contributions or external thought leadership (talks, articles, OSS projects).
• Familiarity with Python, a meaningful portion of our stack is in Python, so it helps you hit the ground running, but the role is language-agnostic.

Other requirements

• AWS as our cloud platform
• GCP as our data warehousing
• Containerised microservices
• A multi-language stack
• Based in or near a CET-compatible timezone
• A dedicated workspace
• A reliable internet connection with the fastest speed possible in your area
• Alignment with Our Values and the Xapo Values-Driven Leadership principles