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