Enterprise Architect

Summary

The Enterprise Architect plays a key role in shaping, advancing, and overseeing the Group's target technology architecture. This senior architecture leader remains actively engaged in technical design, implementation reviews, and mentoring engineering teams. Responsibilities encompass enterprise, solution, integration, and data architecture, along with establishing technology standards, API strategies, and architectural roadmaps to ensure the IT environment is robust, scalable, and adaptable for future growth.

The role ensures all proprietary products and critical third-party systems, such as Fimple, adhere to a contemporary, cloud-native, AI-first architectural approach. It promotes cutting-edge engineering practices, including AI-assisted architecture using tools like AI copilots, architecture modeling, automated code analysis, and design validation, to speed up delivery while preserving high standards in scalability, security, and maintainability across all Finance House Group businesses.

This leadership position maintains close collaboration with business and technology stakeholders, setting governance standards and establishing credibility through active involvement in real systems design rather than purely conceptual work.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the Group’s conceptual and target IT architecture and technology roadmap aligned with business and IT strategies, promoting interoperability, reliability, and long-term sustainability.
• Own enterprise, solution, integration, and data architecture collectively, maintaining reference architectures that support seamless interactions across different domains and business units.
• Advocate a cloud-native, AI-first architecture strategy and continually evaluate emerging technologies and industry benchmarks to stay competitive.
• Identify opportunities to consolidate applications and infrastructure to cut costs, enable expansion, and improve operational efficiency.
• Lead hands-on solution design and conduct thorough reviews of implementations across in-house and vendor platforms, engaging deeply with APIs, code, and architectural elements beyond high-level concepts.
• Deliver expert knowledge in cross-layer architectural patterns, microservices/SOA, OpenAPI, event-driven design, data modeling, security practices, and infrastructure to ensure solutions meet requirements.
• Direct the Group’s API strategy and integration standards to guarantee secure, consistent, and well-regulated interfaces internally and with partners or third-party systems.
• Govern and align strategic vendor platforms, including Fimple, ensuring their integration stays compliant with Group standards for scalability, security, and resilience.
• Mentor enterprise architects, solution architects, technical leads, and development teams to elevate the organization's architectural maturity.
• Promote adoption of AI-assisted architecture and engineering tools such as AI copilots, automated code analysis, documentation, and design validation to accelerate project delivery without sacrificing quality.
• Integrate modern engineering best practices like API-first development, infrastructure as code principles, and automated architecture governance with platform and product teams.
• Collaborate closely with agile teams to translate architectural strategies into actionable, incremental solutions.
• Establish and operate an enterprise architecture governance framework, including standards, templates, documentation, and a business service catalog; enforce compliance through design reviews and evaluations.
• Ensure the architecture proactively mitigates IT risks and upholds data integrity by embedding security and resilience from the design phase.
• Perform architecture assessments, impact analysis, and research to integrate new business initiatives without jeopardizing system stability or scalability.
• Engage with industry groups to benchmark and validate architecture blueprints and facilitate seamless interaction with external systems.
• Work with business and technology stakeholders to align architectural components with business capabilities and strategic goals.
• Advise on new ventures and initiatives to incorporate required functionality into the existing architecture landscape.
• Translate strategic objectives into short-, medium-, and long-term architectural plans, monitoring progress and reporting on implementation.

Qualifications and Experience

• Master’s or Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Systems, or related technical disciplines.
• Mandatory TOGAF certification; professional or architect-level cloud certifications (Azure, AWS) are highly preferred.
• Minimum 12 years of IT experience within financial institutions or banking environments, with extensive senior architecture or technical leadership roles.
• At least 8 years’ experience developing enterprise architecture frameworks, standards, and principles.
• Proven, practical experience designing and implementing large-scale banking IT systems, including high-availability 24x7 transaction systems and customer interfaces.
• Deep expertise in microservices architectures, OpenAPI, application integration, infrastructure, and public cloud migrations.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted architectural and engineering tools as well as modern delivery methodologies.
• Experience collaborating with agile teams and using open source technologies.
• Strong capabilities in governance, stakeholder engagement, and communication, earning influence through technical contributions.