Director of Software Engineering & Enterprise Architecture - Azure - Banking

Director of Software Engineering & Enterprise Architecture - Azure - Banking

Excellent opportunity opens for a Director of Software Engineering & Enterprise Architecture to join a growing International Bank's IT Leadership in a crucial role. Working closely with the COO, CTO and the Change function, you will provide strategic and technical leadership across the bank's technology landscape ensuring that the enterprise architecture supports business goals while leading the software engineering team to deliver secure, scalable, and innovative solutions.

Key Work Outputs and Accountabilities

Strategic & Enterprise Architecture:

• Develop and maintain the enterprise architecture roadmap aligned to business strategy and regulatory requirements. Including owning and delivering a current state assessment of the Bank's enterprise architecture working with key stakeholders and the wider IT team.
• Own and deliver a gap analysis between current state and targe state developing a roadmap to target.
• Define and establish fit for purpose architecture governance framework including principles, and technology standards, to ensure coherence, scalability, and security.
• Oversee solution architecture for key programmes and major change initiatives.
• Evaluate and select core platforms, tools and integration strategies that support digital transformation.
• Partner with business (including Change) and technology leaders to translate strategic goals into technology capabilities.
• Govern architecture compliance and technical debt management through structured review processes.
• Identify relevant, already established governance bodies, to ensure appropriate sign-off and approval processes are followed.
• Proactively provide recommendations for relevant technology innovation to improve efficiency, resilience, or customer experience.
• Play a key role in facilitating decisions and review of key architecture decisions in Architecture Review Forums (ARB)

Software Engineering Leadership:

• Lead and grow the software engineering team, fostering a culture of quality, accountability and continuous improvement.
• Define engineering practices including DevSecOps, CI/CD, test automation, and modern software design principles.
• Oversee design, build, and implementation of internal and customer-facing applications.
• Ensure delivery discipline, code quality, and alignment with architectural standards.
• Drive adoption of cloud-native and API-first architectures where appropriate.
• Establish metrics to monitor performance, reliability, and delivery effectiveness.

Collaboration & Governance:

• Act as the technical liaison between IT, business (including Change team), and operations teams.
• Provide expert input to IT governance forums, investment decisions, and risk management processes.
• Support vendor selection, contract review, and third-party architecture assessments.
• Mentor team members across IT to develop internal talent and succession pipelines.

Key Deliverables:

• A well-defined, pragmatic, and communicated enterprise architecture roadmap.
• High-performing, motivated software engineering team delivering to time, cost and quality.
• Consistent application of security, resilience, and compliance standards across all technology solutions.
• Reduction in technical debt and increased reusability of components.
• Improved alignment between business strategy, architecture, and delivery execution.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Proven experience leading software engineering at a senior management or director level, ideally in a regulated environment.
• Deep understanding of enterprise software development, architecture, and delivery practices.
• Experience in leading large-scale transformation, including agile and DevOps adoption.
• Strong understanding of core banking systems, digital channels, and integration architectures
• Familiarity with Temenos T24 and other similar vendor platforms within in Core Banking/Trade Finance domain
• Strong understanding of core banking systems, digital channels, and integration architectures
• Practical experience designing secure, scalable, and resilient solutions across infrastructure, data, application, and security domains.
• Strong demonstratable hands-on experience in Azure Cloud technology stack, microservices, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Proven experience with Data Architecture, Data Lake/Warehouses, ETL/ELT tech stack, Medallion architecture, Data Ops & Data Governance and visualization tools
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills, capable of influencing at senior levels.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Information Technology/Systems, Engineering, or related field.
• Relevant professional certifications (eg, TOGAF, Azure Architecture etc) are desirable.

Interested? Please apply!

Enterprise Architect Enterprise Architecture Head of Architecture Azure Head of Developement Lead Developer Change Transformation Data Architecture T24 Temenos Core Banking Bank Banking Finance Financial Services Trade Finance