Principal Architect

We Are

YouTrip is the leading and fastest-growing multi-currency payment platform in Asia Pacific. In 2018, we pioneered the region's first multi-currency digital wallet. Now, YouTrip is the #1 multi-currency digital wallet trusted by millions across the region, processing over US$15 billion in total payment value annually.

Our consumer and business propositions - YouTrip and YouBiz - empower individuals and businesses with inclusive, accessible, and affordable financial solutions. YouTrip has raised over US$110 million to date, including its recent Series B round led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners—underscoring strong investor confidence in its mission to transform digital financial services across the Asia Pacific.

Recognised as World Economic Forum's Global Innovator 2025, CNBC's World's Top Fintech Companies (2025, 2024), and LinkedIn's Top Startup (2024, 2023), YouTrip is dedicated to creating the next generation of digital finance services for consumers and businesses.

Valuing an entrepreneurial culture of diversity and inclusion, we are seeking driven individuals to join our fast-growing regional team as we push the boundaries of innovative fintech solutions.

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Architect to own the technical architecture of our core systems across YouTrip and YouBiz. This is a company-wide remit. You will be the deepest technical voice in the room on system design, architectural decisions, and engineering standards, working across every product domain from payments infrastructure to consumer and business applications.

This is a senior individual contributor role, reporting directly to the CPTO. You are not a solutions architect producing diagrams for vendors. You are a builder who has written production code at scale and now applies that experience to shape how systems are designed, how they perform, and how they evolve.

You Will

Own Architectural Direction

Define and maintain the architectural vision across our core systems, balancing technical correctness with pragmatic delivery

Lead architectural decisions company-wide, from high-level system design through to component-level tradeoffs

Establish and enforce coding standards and development standards that raise the quality bar across the engineering organisation

Produce architectural documentation that is precise, opinionated, and actually used by the teams building against it

Payments and Financial Systems

Serve as the internal authority on payment systems architecture, real-time financial processing, ledger design, and card scheme integrations

Drive architectural decisions across acquiring, issuing, FX, clearing, and settlement systems with deep domain knowledge

Anticipate the technical implications of regulatory, scheme, and processor requirements and design ahead of them

Identify architectural risk in financial systems before it becomes an operational incident

System Performance and Technical Tradeoffs

Own system-level performance, scalability, and reliability as architectural concerns, not afterthoughts

Define the right tradeoffs between consistency, availability, latency, and cost across different system domains

Go deep where it matters, down to data model design, field-level decisions, and protocol-level behaviour, and connect that detail back to the broader architecture

Set the standard for how the engineering organisation thinks about distributed systems, failure modes, and recovery

Vendor and External Technical Engagement

Lead technical evaluation and oversight of vendors, processors, and third-party platforms

Engage external partners with enough depth to challenge their recommendations and hold them to the right technical bar

Translate vendor capabilities and constraints into architectural decisions with clear rationale

Raise the Engineering Bar

Mentor and influence senior engineers and tech leads across teams, elevating how the organisation approaches system design

Review and challenge architectural proposals from engineering teams, providing structured and direct feedback

Over time, build and lead a small group of architects as the function matures

Requirements

You Are

Payments domain expert. You have deep, hands-on experience designing real-time financial systems. You understand ledger architecture, card scheme mechanics, payment processing pipelines, and the operational constraints that come with them. This is not negotiable

Software architect, not solutions architect. You have written production-grade code and scaled complex systems. Your architectural credibility comes from having built things, not from having advised on them

Top-to-bottom systems thinker. You move fluidly between system-level architecture and the lowest levels of implementation detail. You are as comfortable debating a data field type or an API contract as you are designing a distributed settlement system. Nothing is too high level or too granular for you to engage with rigorously

Strong documentation instinct. You write clearly and precisely. Your architecture docs, design reviews, and technical decisions are thorough, structured, and built to outlast the conversation that produced them. You treat documentation as part of the work, not a follow-up task

Technically opinionated. You have strong views on coding standards, system design patterns, and development practices, and you can articulate and defend them clearly. You do not produce wishy-washy recommendations

Vendor-savvy. You have engaged payment processors, card schemes, and infrastructure vendors at a technical level. You know when a vendor is right and when they need to be pushed back on

Clear communicator. You can explain a complex architectural decision to the engineering team or senior stakeholders including C-Suite without changing what you actually think