Head of Architecture - Target Operating Model - Payments - Financial Services

Head of Architecture - Target Operating Model - Payments - Financial Services

Excellent opportunity opens for a visionary Head of Architecture based in London to lead this growing Financial Services firm's architectural strategy and play a pivotal role in our multi-year transformation toward an agentic, intelligence driven Target Operating Model (TOM). You will own the end-to-end enterprise architecture, modernise our design principles, and guide a talented team of architects through this evolution.

You will lead a small team of enterprise and domain architects and report directly to the CTO, working within a collaborative Technology Leadership Team. Technology is foundational to our transformation, and architecture plays a central, integrative role in re-platforming the Bank for an intelligent future.

As Head of Architecture, you will:

• Define and own the current state, transitional, and target state architectures across business, data, applications, and technology domains.
• Design and implement the architecture needed to support an agentic, AI enabled Target Operating Model, including autonomy layers, orchestration patterns, and human in the loop principles.
• Update the architecture function with modern workflows, flexible governance, and streamlined guardrails for continuous delivery.
• Lead, mentor and develop a high performing architecture team, fostering modern engineering practices and capability maturity.
• Shape strategic technology roadmaps, partnering with senior stakeholders to identify transformational opportunities across Payments, FX, Data, AI, and Platform domains.
• Lead complex, multi-disciplinary change across Legacy and modern systems, driving architectural simplification and scalable patterns.
• Work closely with engineering and change teams to deliver measurable business outcomes, translating architectural intent into practical execution frameworks and incremental value.

Responsibilities

• Develop enterprise architecture models, reference architectures, and standards aligned to our agentic TOM.
• Translate roadmaps into modular work packages enabling iterative, continuous value delivery.
• Champion event driven, microservices based, cloud native architectures and their associated patterns.
• Foster adaptive design, engineering excellence, and feedback driven evolution across teams.
• Govern architectural decisions pragmatically balancing innovation, technical debt, and regulatory expectations.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior executives on strategic technology decisions and business architecture alignment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading architecture functions in high change, transformation heavy environments.
• Deep expertise in Payments, FX, or high scale transaction processing platforms.
• Hands on experience architecting distributed, event driven, microservices oriented systems.
• Strong communication and stakeholder influencing skills with senior leadership.
• Experience working across modern and Legacy technologies, including pathways for modernisation.
• Comfortable in regulated environments with strong cross functional engagement.
• Familiarity with architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, ArchiMate, or similar.

Highly Desirable

• Experience with AI, agentic architectures, intelligent orchestration, or autonomous workflows.
• Experience in cross border FX and payments.
• Background in systems engineering, data architecture, or platform engineering.
• Technical degree required.

Interested? Please Apply!

Head of Architecture Lead Architect Architecture Manager Architecture Lead Business Data Applications Technology Domains Autonomy Layers Orchestration Patterns Human-in-the-loop principles Payments FX Data AI Platform Domains Technical Debt Regulatory Expectations Regulations Bank Banking Finance Financial Institutions Business-architecture alignment Business Architecture Alignment AI Agentic Architecture Cross-border FX Systems Engineering Data Architecture Platform Engineering