Global Head, Architecture

We are seeking a senior technology leader (Senior Principal Engineer / Chief Architect & Technology Strategy) to partner closely with the Head of Technology for Enterprise Solutions in shaping the technology direction of a complex, regulated financial-services estate.

This is a hands-on principal engineer and architect role, not a pure governance or advisory architecture function. The role exists to ensure technology strategy is grounded in engineering reality, deep domain understanding, and operational outcomes.

You will work directly with the Head of Technology to shape and refine strategy, stress-testing ideas against engineering, regulatory, and operational constraints. You will engage closely with senior engineering leaders, platform teams, and product partners to turn strategy into real designs that can be built and run.

You will get involved early in complex or high-risk initiatives and step in when it matters most, including during major incidents and recovery efforts. A key part of the role is knowing when to push forward, when to simplify, and when to slow down or stop.

You will act as the engineering authority across Enterprise Solutions, leading primarily through influence rather than line management and the role carries broad responsibility for shaping architecture, design, and delivery decisions across multiple teams and domains.

You will balance long-term strategy with near-term delivery constraints, operational resilience, and regulatory expectations, and represent the technology direction with clients and senior stakeholders, explaining design choices and trade-offs clearly and credibly. Overall, this role strengthens the technology function by making strategy buildable, operable, and defensible.

Experienced in setting technology strategy and architecture for complex, regulated, data-driven platforms, with strong experience in banking and financial services (public and private markets, syndicated lending, securities processing, counterparty and client lifecycle, regulatory reporting, or similar domains)

Experienced in defining and owning multi-year technology strategies and roadmaps, setting clear priorities and sequencing change based on business outcomes, regulatory needs, and engineering reality

Sets and governs reference architectures, design standards, and architectural guardrails, ensuring teams build in a consistent, scalable, and sustainable way.

Strong understanding of how financial products, operational workflows, data, and controls work end-to-end, and uses that understanding to make sound system and platform design decisions

Has demonstrated strong judgment designing distributed, event-driven, and data-intensive systems, including how they scale, fail, recover, and isolate risk.

Experienced with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and the trade-offs around managed services, multi-region and multi-tenant designs, data residency, cost, performance, and resilience.

Knowledge of advanced and new architectures and design paradigms e.g. agent-based systems, service abstractions, semantic data models, knowledge graphs, and where to apply or not.

Experienced in ensuring AI-enabled systems are explainable, auditable, and operationally safe, with clear judgment on when AI is appropriate versus deterministic or rules-based approaches. Strong understanding of analytics and AI in production (e.g. data quality, anomaly detection, fraud/AML, workflow automation) and understands what it takes to run these reliably in regulated environments.

Designs with security and controls built in, with a strong understanding of identity, data protection, failure containment, and regulatory risk.

• 20+ years building and operating systems in tier-1 banks, capital markets infrastructure, or similarly regulated, high-availability environments. Has owned or deeply influenced production systems under real load, is comfortable reading and writing code, and works effectively alongside senior engineers.
• Acts as a coach and multiplier for senior engineers and architects, raising the bar through hands-on problem solving, design reviews, and practical guidance rather than formal line management.
• Pragmatic, direct, and outcome focused. Leads through earned credibility and influence, is comfortable shaping decisions without authority, and communicates complex technical topics clearly to business, client, and regulatory audiences.
• Measures success by outcomes and evidence, not intent or presentation: technology strategy that translates into systems that work in production, reduce late-stage surprises and repeat incidents, scale and recover as designed, and stand up to real operational and regulatory scrutiny.
• Our team of experts delivers unrivaled insights and leading data and technology solutions, partnering with customers to expand their perspective, operate with confidence, and make decisions with conviction.