Senior Solution Architect

Overview

A prominent financial technology company seeks an experienced Senior Solution Architect to lead the design and delivery of scalable, high-availability, and resilient enterprise applications for the financial services sector. The role requires deep application development experience and specialized knowledge in banking systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead comprehensive solution architecture initiatives for critical financial systems such as Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), Customer Service/Operations (CSU), and Anti-Money Laundering (AML), ensuring zero-failure infrastructure to protect valuable assets.
• Design and manage payment and settlement flows using ISO 20022 standards and oversee the transition from legacy messaging formats.
• Integrate real-time AML/KYC fraud detection mechanisms seamlessly into transaction workflows without increasing latency.
• Create frameworks supporting immutable audit trails, data lineage, and complex lifecycle management for financial products.
• Develop resilient architectures with zero data loss (RPO=0) and sub-minute recovery objectives (RTO) through multi-region, active-active cloud deployments.
• Ensure strong ACID compliance across distributed systems to maintain ledger integrity.
• Architect systems capable of massive scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery readiness aligned with enterprise and regulatory requirements.
• Produce high-level and detailed architecture designs adhering to compliance, security, and best practice standards.
• Analyze and recommend appropriate technologies, architectural patterns, integration methods, and platform choices.
• Promote cloud-native architecture adoption (AWS, Azure, GCP) focusing on elastically scalable, multi-region, and resilient workloads.
• Guide engineering teams through the software development lifecycle to meet performance, reliability, and regulatory objectives.
• Conduct architecture and design reviews, including performance benchmarking and failure mode analyses.
• Lead governance processes promoting best practices in scalable, secure banking applications.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, products, compliance, DevOps, QA teams to translate financial requirements into robust architectures and ensure smooth implementation.
• Present architecture solutions clearly to senior executives and non-technical audiences.
• Design complex integrations among enterprise systems, payment gateways, fraud detection, core banking, and external fintech partners, ensuring low latency and high throughput for real-time transactions.
• Ensure all solutions meet strict financial security and regulatory standards such as PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, MAS, SOX, and GDPR.
• Lead threat modeling, data protection strategies, and implement secure-by-design principles.
• Design and manage HA/DR strategies with multi-zone and multi-region deployments, including resilience testing.

Experience and Expertise

• Over 10 years of experience in solution architecture, software engineering, and enterprise application design.
• Strong understanding of RTGS systems (e.g., SWIFT, Fedwire, local RTGS platforms).
• Proficient with financial messaging standards including ISO 20022, MT/MX messaging, and transaction monitoring.
• Well-versed with regulatory frameworks such as PCI-DSS, AML/CTF, and mandates from regional central banks.
• Expertise in designing massively scalable distributed systems and real-time transaction processing platforms.
• Proven capability in implementing high availability and disaster recovery designs and operations.

Technical Skills

• Messaging technologies including ISO 20022, Kafka, RabbitMQ.
• Architectural patterns such as Event Sourcing, Saga Pattern, and techniques for idempotency.
• Data and security technologies including Hardware Security Module (HSM) integration, mutual TLS (mTLS), SQL and NoSQL databases, and Distributed Ledger Technologies.
• Cloud platforms expertise encompassing AWS, Azure, and GCP with emphasis on multi-region resilience.

Additional Information

Halian Group brings over 28 years of experience in providing innovative, nimble solutions that transform both organizations and careers. They value diversity, equity, and inclusion and are committed to connecting organizations with diverse talent while fostering inclusive workplaces that drive innovation and collaboration.