Head of Technology Architecture

Head of Technology Architecture

£125,000 – £145,000 + 20% Bonus | London | Hybrid

We’re partnering with a leading global organisation operating at the heart of the payments and FinTech ecosystem to appoint a Head of Technology Architecture.

This is a senior, business-critical leadership position with ownership of the organisation’s technology architecture vision, strategy and roadmap, spanning solution, platform and data architecture. You’ll lead and develop a team of Architects while working closely with the CTO, Engineering, Product and wider technology leadership to ensure architecture supports both immediate delivery and long-term growth.

The organisation operates a large-scale, highly regulated payments environment, so we’re looking for someone who combines deep technical architecture expertise with strong payments knowledge and leadership capability.

You’ll take ownership of the end-to-end architectural landscape, helping to define technology choices, integration patterns, API standards and architectural governance across multiple product domains.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Defining and delivering the overall technology and solution architecture strategy
• Owning the architecture roadmap and ensuring alignment with business and product strategy
• Leading and developing a team across Solution, Platform and Data Architecture
• Driving architecture across Java-based distributed systems, microservices and AWS
• Establishing architectural standards, patterns and governance
• Supporting the ongoing evolution from legacy technology towards cloud-native AWS services
• Working closely with Engineering and Product leadership to balance scalability, security, performance and speed of delivery
• Evaluating emerging technologies and helping shape the organisation’s approach to AI
• Acting as a senior escalation point for complex architectural decisions
• Representing Architecture within executive and strategic forums

This is a senior leadership role, but we're still looking for someone with significant technical depth.

You'll ideally bring:

• Extensive experience within Technology, Enterprise or Solution Architecture
• Previous experience leading and developing teams of Architects
• Deep knowledge of Java-based distributed systems and microservices architecture
• Strong AWS experience within large-scale enterprise environments
• Experience designing highly available, scalable and resilient platforms
• Strong knowledge of APIs, integration patterns and event-driven architectures, including technologies such as Kafka, SQS or SNS
• Experience defining architecture strategy, governance and operating models
• Exposure to modern AI technologies and LLMs, and an understanding of how these can be safely applied within products
• Excellent stakeholder management with the ability to influence at executive level
• Payments experience
• Given the nature of the platform, we're particularly interested in candidates with a strong background across payments, banking or FinTech.

Experience across areas such as card issuing, payment gateways, payment orchestration, switching, ISO 8583/20022, PCI DSS, PSD2, Open Banking or real-time payments would be highly beneficial.

You'll be joining an organisation operating complex, high-volume payment technology where architecture has a genuine impact on the wider business. The environment includes 24/7 payment-critical systems, an ongoing migration towards AWS, multiple Java engineering teams and a wider multi-cloud landscape.