Open role

Chief Architect

Own the architecture. Hold the thread. Build the thing.

Ho Chi Minh CityReports to CEO, Zeya Labs

What This Role Is

Zeya Labs is building a shared services platform that spans a regulated bank, a mobile money operation, and a range of commercial businesses. Someone has to hold the technical thread across all of it. That is this role.

The Chief Architect is the technical conscience of the platform - ensuring that every major technical decision across the shared services stack is coherent, defensible, and pointing in the same direction. And when something is being built in a way that compromises that integrity, this role has the authority to stop it and redirect it.

This is a hands-on role. You produce architecture, not just review it. You are expected to be in the detail - making decisions, writing designs, challenging assumptions - not sitting above the work.

Concretely, the Chief Architect is responsible for three things:

Architecture integrity across the platform.

Owning the company-wide architecture blueprint and ensuring every shared service being built conforms to it. API design, cloud strategy, integration patterns, security reference architecture, data architecture - the decisions that compound over time and create either a defensible platform or a maintenance problem.

Hands-on technical leadership.

Producing architecture artefacts, leading design reviews, contributing to technical decisions at the squad level where it matters. Financial services is the centre of gravity - core banking integration, payments infrastructure, API layer design, and the regulatory constraints that shape all of it. You will also design and govern AI architectures at a sophisticated level - model serving infrastructure, RAG pipelines, agentic frameworks, MLOps lifecycle.

Building and developing the architecture function.

Owning all architecture domains across the company - platform, data, security, integration. Setting the standard for how architecture work gets done: how designs get reviewed, how technical decisions get documented, how the architecture keeps pace with delivery.

What You Will Actually Do

Architecture and platform integrity

Own and maintain the company-wide architecture blueprint - cloud strategy, microservices and domain boundaries, API-first patterns, event-driven architecture, integration approach
Define and enforce architecture standards across all shared platform utilities - API gateway, shared IAM, observability stack, data pipelines
Lead the architecture review process for significant design decisions - ensuring they are assessed and documented before being committed to
Hold a genuine right to stop and redirect work that violates architecture standards; exercise it with clear reasoning and minimal disruption to delivery
Own the security reference architecture - setting the standards that govern how security is designed into the platform and all shared services

Financial services and integration depth

Design and govern the integration layer between group entities - ensuring interoperability without creating brittle point-to-point dependencies
Ensure architecture decisions are compliant with applicable regulatory requirements across all group entities, particularly in regulated financial services environments
Own the data architecture across the group - including data residency, sovereignty, and cross-border data flow standards

Technical leadership and team

Own all architecture domains - platform, data, security, integration - and ensure they are covered through the right combination of internal resource, group services, and external expertise
Work alongside the Head of Engineering & Delivery as a complementary counterpart - direction and integrity on one side, execution and delivery on the other
Contribute to senior technical hiring decisions across the team
Represent the Zeya Labs architecture function in stakeholder forums with entity CIOs and group technology leadership

Who We Are Looking For

You have spent a significant part of your career inside complex, regulated technology environments - financial services most likely, or a sector with comparable compliance weight. You have made consequential architecture decisions and lived with the results of them.

You are hands-on. You produce architecture, not just opinions about it. You are comfortable writing designs, running technical reviews, and being challenged on your decisions by engineers who know the domain well.

You understand financial services technology at a level that goes beyond familiarity. Core banking, payment rails, mobile money infrastructure, API-first integration design in regulated environments - this is not territory you are learning on the job.

You have operated as a senior or principal architect in a multi-entity or group technology environment - not just a single-product context
You are technically credible enough to hold a room with entity CIOs and engineering leads without relying on seniority or title
You understand the difference between architecture that is theoretically sound and architecture that a small team can actually build and operate
You are collaborative with the engineering team and direct when something needs to be corrected
You have managed or mentored at least one senior technical specialist
You are comfortable being a team of two in the architecture function - there is no architecture practice to inherit, you are building it
Experience with AI-native or cloud-native delivery models is a strong advantage
Fluency in English is required; Vietnamese is an advantage

What We Offer

Real architecture authority - a genuine right to stop and redirect work, not an advisory seat
Group-wide scope from day one across financial services, F&B, retail, hospitality, real estate
The chance to set the standard - no existing architecture function to inherit and no legacy blueprint to maintain
A technically serious environment - a small, capable team that will challenge your decisions
Board-level visibility - architecture decisions feed directly into group governance and board reporting
Flexibility - we care about output, not hours. Hybrid working is the default
An AI-native environment - we build with AI tools across the team

Location

Ho Chi Minh City

Reports to

CEO, Zeya Labs

Direct reports

Data Architect

Send us an email at build@zeyalabs.ai