Enterprise/Solution Architect

About Empyrean's FP&A Platform

We're building the next generation of financial planning & analysis software for banks and credit unions - integrated Profitability, Budgeting & Planning, and CECL solutions that give finance and treasury teams a single, reliable platform for performance management and regulatory compliance. Our Cork engineering team of 45+ engineers owns the FP&A product suite end-to-end, and we're transforming how these products are built: modern cloud-native architecture, AI-first development, and agentic capabilities that fundamentally change how financial analysts work.

Role Overview

As Enterprise/Solution Architect for FP&A, you'll own the architectural vision and hands-on execution for Empyrean's financial planning & analysis product suite. This is not an ivory tower role - you'll set architectural direction AND prove it out in code. You'll work across Planning, Profitability, and CECL products, designing the systems that scale from community banks to tier 1 institutions while driving the modernization of our stack toward cloud-native, AI-first patterns.

You'll pair with our existing Enterprise Architect in Cork, report to the Director of Engineering (FP&A), and collaborate closely with Platform Engineering, Data Platform, and product leadership. Your architectural decisions will directly shape how 45+ engineers build, and how hundreds of financial institutions run their businesses.

This role is Cork-based (Ireland required) and requires three days a week in the office.

Time Allocation

• 50%+ Hands On Architecture & Code - Writing production code, building proof of concepts, reviewing PRs, validating architectural decisions through implementation. You prove your designs work by building them.
• 25% Architectural Direction & Standards - Defining domain architecture, API contracts, service boundaries, data flow patterns, and integration points across the FP&A suite. Ensuring consistency and interoperability with the broader Empyrean platform.
• 15% Technical Leadership & Collaboration - Partnering with the existing EA, Platform Engineering, Data Platform, and product teams. Mentoring senior engineers on architectural thinking.
• 10% Innovation & Agentic Enablement - Identifying where AI and agentic capabilities can transform FP&A workflows - not chatbot hello worlds, but intelligent automation that changes how financial analysts interact with planning, profitability, and credit loss data.

Required Qualifications Experience

• 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ years in architecture roles (enterprise, solution, or principal level)
• Critical: Personally designed AND built distributed systems at scale - not just drew the diagrams
• Proven experience modernizing legacy systems incrementally while maintaining production stability
• Track record of setting architectural standards adopted by teams of 20+ engineers
• Experience with financial services, banking, or regulated industries strongly preferred

Technical Expertise

• Deep .NET/C# expertise with modern patterns (clean architecture, domain driven design, CQRS/event sourcing where appropriate)
• TypeScript/Angular experience (full stack credibility matters)
• Cloud native architecture on Azure (AWS/GCP transferable)
• API design: versioned contracts, backward compatibility, consumer driven testing
• Event driven and messaging patterns (Azure Service Bus, pub sub architectures)
• Microservices and service decomposition - knowing when to split AND when to keep things together
• Database architecture: relational and analytical workloads, performance optimization at scale
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipeline design
• Containerization and orchestration patterns

AI & Agentic Readiness

• Active user of AI development tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code) - not aspirational, current
• Understanding of agentic architecture patterns: tool use, orchestration, multi agent systems
• Vision for how AI transforms domain specific workflows beyond generic chatbot interfaces
• Familiarity with LLM integration patterns, RAG architectures, or AI platform services (Azure AI Foundry, LangChain/LangGraph, etc.)

Architectural Mindset

• Balances pragmatism with vision - ships today's solution while designing tomorrow's architecture
• Thinks in domain boundaries, data ownership, and API contracts
• Designs for team autonomy: your architecture enables engineers to move fast independently
• Understands platform economics: build vs. buy, shared services vs. team owned, cost at scale
• Incremental delivery over big bang rewrites

We're NOT Looking For

• Architects who haven't written production code in 2+ years
• PowerPoint architects who define systems they've never built
• Governance heavy, RACI first thinkers who slow teams down
• Anyone who can't articulate specific examples of systems they personally architected AND scaled
• Enterprise architecture tourists without depth in at least one modern stack
• "AI is interesting" without demonstrated hands on experience