Senior Payments Solution Architect
Senior Payments Solution Architect - London
Overview
We are seeking a senior, hands-on Solution Architect with deep payments scheme and migration experience. This role is for practitioners who have delivered complex payments migrations in live production environments, not generic enterprise architects.
Essential Experience
- Senior-level leadership of payments migration within large PMI programmes
- Strong hands-on experience with UK payment schemes:
- BACS
- Faster Payments (FPS)
- International payments and messaging experience:
- SWIFT
- SEPA
- Direct architectural ownership across core payments processing, including:
- Scheme and gateway integration
- Message transformation and routing
- Clearing, settlement, reconciliation, and downstream processing
- Strong understanding of end-to-end payment life cycles and real-world production flows
Risk, Controls & Assurance
- Proven experience leading payments risk, controls, and regulatory assurance
- Practical experience with CASS and CISA-aligned assurance or audit frameworks
Technical & Legacy Environments
- Experience working in Legacy and non-standard payment environments
- Ability to design within constraints and reconcile documented vs actual system behaviour
- Familiarity with:
- Mainframe-integrated architectures
- MQ
- MT/MX message translation
Delivery & Stakeholder Skills
- Strong focus on minimising risk to live payment processing
- Ability to identify and escalate issues early and support pragmatic migration solutions
- Clear communication with engineering teams and SMEs
- Able to clearly articulate:
- Schemes worked on
- Architectural responsibilities
- Specific ownership within the payments flow