Summary

The Enterprise Architect is responsible for defining, evolving and governing the Group's target technology architecture while remaining a hands on technical leader who actively designs solutions, reviews implementations and mentors engineering teams. The role owns enterprise, solution, integration and data architecture, technology standards, API strategy and architectural roadmaps, ensuring the IT landscape is fit for purpose, operationally resilient, scalable and adaptive to future growth.

The Enterprise Architect ensures that all in house products and third party platforms including Fimple and other strategic vendor systems align with a modern, cloud-native, AI-first architecture. The role champions modern engineering and AI assisted architecture practices, leveraging AI copilots, architecture modelling, code analysis, automated documentation and design validation to accelerate delivery while maintaining high standards of scalability, security, resilience and maintainability across Finance House Group businesses.

This is a senior architecture leadership role that stays deliberately close to the technology: the successful candidate partners with both business and technology groups, sets standards through governance, and earns authority by designing and reviewing real systems alongside the teams not by operating solely at the diagram level.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture Strategy & Roadmap

• Define the Group's conceptual and target IT architecture and technology roadmap, aligned to business and IT strategy, ensuring interoperability, stability and long term sustainability.
• Own enterprise, solution, integration and data architecture as a coherent whole, maintaining reference architectures that enable seamless interaction across domains and business units.
• Drive a cloud native, AI first architecture direction, and continuously assess emerging technologies, benchmarks and technology watch to keep the landscape modern and competitive.
• Identify opportunities for application and infrastructure consolidation to reduce cost, enable growth and increase operational efficiency across the Group.

Hands-On Design & Technical Leadership

• Actively design solutions and review implementations across in house products and vendor platforms contributing to and critiquing real designs, APIs and code, not only high level blueprints.
• Provide deep expertise in cross-layer architecture patterns, microservices/SOA, OpenAPI, event driven design, data modelling, security and infrastructure to ensure solutions are fit for purpose.
• Own the Group API strategy and integration standards, ensuring consistent, secure and well governed interfaces across internal systems, partners and third-party platforms.
• Govern the architectural alignment of strategic vendor platforms (including Fimple), ensuring third party solutions integrate cleanly and meet Group standards for scalability, security and resilience.
• Mentor and uplift enterprise architects, solution architects, technical leads and engineering teams, raising the architectural maturity of the organisation.

AI-Assisted & Modern Engineering Practices

• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted architecture and engineering AI copilots, architecture modelling tools, automated code analysis, automated documentation and design validation to accelerate delivery without compromising quality.
• Embed modern engineering practices (API-first, infrastructure as code awareness, automated architecture governance) into the delivery lifecycle in partnership with platform and product teams.
• Work closely with agile delivery teams, translating architectural intent into practical, incrementally deliverable designs.

Governance, Risk & Standards

• Design and operate the enterprise architecture governance framework principles, standards, templates, documentation and a business service catalogue and enforce it through design reviews and assessments.
• Ensure the overall architecture protects the organisation against IT risk and safeguards data integrity, embedding security and resilience by design.
• Conduct architecture assessments, impact analysis and research to ensure new business initiatives are incorporated into the landscape without compromising stability or scalability.
• Liaise with industry and common interest groups to benchmark and validate design blueprints and ensure effective interaction with external interfaces.

Business Alignment

• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to align business, application, data and technology architectures with business capabilities and strategic objectives.
• Advise on new businesses and initiatives, incorporating required functionality into the existing landscape.
• Translate strategy into short, medium and long term architectural plans, monitoring and reporting on delivery against them.

Qualification

• Master's or Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Systems or a related field.
• TOGAF certification is a must; cloud architecture certification (Azure and/or AWS) at professional/architect level is strongly preferred.

Knowledge, Experience and Skills

• At least 12 years in IT within financial services (banks/financial institutions), including significant time in senior architecture or technical leadership roles designing and ideally operating large scale systems.
• Minimum 8 years building enterprise architecture frameworks, standards and principles.
• Proven, hands on design and implementation experience for bank IT landscapes, real time 24x7 processing systems and customer interface technologies.
• Deep experience in microservices architecture, OpenAPI, application integration and the underlying infrastructure, plus public cloud migration.
• Practical experience with AI assisted architecture/engineering tools and modern delivery practices.
• Experience working with agile teams and open source technologies.
• Strong governance, stakeholder management and communication skills, with the credibility to lead through hands on technical contribution.