Solution Architect – Kafka & Payments (Banking Domain)

Location:

London / Glasgow

Employment Type:

Full-Time / Contract

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Solution Architect with strong expertise in Apache Kafka and real-time payment systems within the banking domain. The ideal candidate will design scalable, event-driven architectures that power high-volume, mission-critical payment processing platforms.

This role requires deep knowledge of distributed systems, financial transaction processing, and regulatory-compliant banking solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Design

• Design and implement event-driven, microservices-based architectures using Apache Kafka
• Architect scalable and resilient real-time payment processing systems
• Define canonical data models for financial transactions and reconciliation
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery strategies
• Lead architecture governance and design reviews

Payments & Banking Domain

• Architect solutions for:
• Real-time payments (RTP)
• ACH, SWIFT, SEPA, ISO 20022 messaging
• Card processing systems
• Cross-border payments
• Design end-to-end transaction lifecycle management
• Implement reconciliation and settlement flows
• Ensure regulatory compliance (PCI-DSS, AML, KYC, SOX where applicable)

Kafka & Streaming Expertise

• Design Kafka clusters for high throughput and low latency
• Define topic strategy, partitioning, replication, and retention policies
• Implement exactly-once processing semantics
• Apply event-driven design patterns
• Integrate Kafka with core banking and payment platforms
• Experience with Kafka Streams / ksqlDB / Confluent platform preferred

Governance & Security

• Ensure secure API design and data encryption standards
• Define data governance and access controls
• Maintain observability (logging, tracing, monitoring)
• Ensure system compliance with banking regulations

Collaboration

• Work closely with product owners, payment operations, compliance teams, and engineering teams
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship
• Translate business requirements into scalable architectural solutions

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering / architecture
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka
• 5+ years of experience in payments systems
• Strong banking domain knowledge
• Proven experience designing event-driven and distributed systems
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong understanding of high-availability and scalable system design

Technical Skills

• Apache Kafka (Core, Streams, Connect)
• Java / Scala / Python (at least one preferred)
• Microservices architecture
• REST & event-driven APIs
• SQL & NoSQL databases
• CI/CD pipelines
• Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)