Global Head, Architecture

The Global Head, Architecture will partner with the Head of Technology for Enterprise Solutions to shape the technology direction of a complex, regulated financial-services estate. This is a hands-on principal engineer and architect role, not a pure governance or advisory architecture function.

What You Will Do

You will work directly with the Head of Technology to shape and refine strategy, stress-testing ideas against engineering, regulatory, and operational constraints. You will engage closely with senior engineering leaders, platform teams, and product partners to turn strategy into real designs that can be built and run.

Why It Might Be a Fit

You will act as the engineering authority across Enterprise Solutions, leading primarily through influence rather than line management. You will balance long-term strategy with near-term delivery constraints, operational resilience, and regulatory expectations.

Requirements

• 25+ years of experience building and operating systems in tier-1 banks, capital markets infrastructure, or similarly regulated, high-availability environments
• Has owned or deeply influenced production systems under real load, is comfortable reading and writing code, and works effectively alongside senior engineers
• Experienced in setting technology strategy and architecture for complex, regulated, data-driven platforms, with strong experience in banking and financial services
• Experienced in defining and owning multi-year technology strategies and roadmaps, setting clear priorities and sequencing change based on business outcomes, regulatory needs, and engineering reality
• Sets and governs reference architectures, design standards, and architectural guardrails, ensuring teams build in a consistent, scalable, and sustainable way
• Strong understanding of how financial products, operational workflows, data, and controls work end-to-end, and uses that understanding to make sound system and platform design decisions
• Has demonstrated strong judgment designing distributed, event-driven, and data-intensive systems, including how they scale, fail, recover, and isolate risk
• Experienced with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and the trade-offs around managed services, multi-region and multi-tenant designs, data residency, cost, performance, and resilience
• Knowledge of advanced and new architectures and design paradigms e.g. agent-based systems, service abstractions, semantic data models, knowledge graphs, and where to apply or not
• Experienced in ensuring AI-enabled systems are explainable, auditable, and operationally safe, with clear judgment on when AI is appropriate versus deterministic or rules-based approaches
• Designs with security and controls built in, with a strong understanding of identity, data protection, failure containment, and regulatory risk
• Acts as a coach and multiplier for senior engineers and architects, raising the bar through hands-on problem solving, design reviews, and practical guidance rather than formal line management
• Pragmatic, direct, and outcome focused. Leads through earned credibility and influence, is comfortable shaping decisions without authority, and communicates complex technical topics clearly to business, client, and regulatory audiences

Benefits

• Health & Wellness
• Flexible Downtime
• Continuous Learning
• Invest in Your Future
• Family Friendly Perks
• Beyond the Basics