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FIS is seeking a Principal Solution Architect to shape and oversee the end-to-end architecture of a modern payments platform built on microservices. This is a senior technical leadership role where you will provide architectural guidance across product and engineering teams, translating business strategy into clear architectural roadmaps and ensuring solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, and aligned with enterprise standards.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own end-to-end solution architecture for complex, business-critical payment capabilities across multiple products, services, channels, and integration points
- Define current, target, and transition architectures; maintain technology roadmaps guiding platform modernisation and investment decisions
- Convert business, product, regulatory, security, and operational needs into clear architecture principles, solution designs, and practical guidance for delivery teams
- Lead architecture governance through solution proposals, architecture decisions, interface specifications, and design documents
- Establish clear service responsibilities and integration patterns for APIs, event-driven messaging, and batch processing
- Ensure solutions meet demanding requirements for resilience, availability, performance, scalability, observability, security, operability, upgradeability, and backward compatibility
- Collaborate with senior leaders across product management, engineering, security, operations, and client-facing teams to resolve cross-functional trade-offs
- Provide architectural leadership for strategic client engagements, proposals, and complex implementations
- Support delivery teams during implementation, confirm adherence to agreed designs, and address significant departures from target architecture
- Mentor architects and senior engineers; strengthen architecture practices across the organisation
Requirements:
- Extensive experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale software platforms throughout the development lifecycle, from iterative delivery to production deployment
- Proven experience leading architecture of complex, distributed, microservices-based systems across multiple teams and organisational boundaries
- Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end solution architecture, target-state roadmaps, architecture governance, and major technical decisions
- Deep knowledge of API design, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, service decomposition, and systems integration
- Strong understanding of distributed systems: data consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, circuit breaking, asynchronous processing, backward-compatible change
- Strong technical expertise in Java and JVM-based enterprise platforms, relational databases (Oracle or PostgreSQL), and modern software delivery practices
- Experience designing secure, resilient, highly available, scalable, observable, and operationally manageable systems for business-critical environments
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders, guide decisions where priorities compete, and explain complex architecture to technical and non-technical audiences
- Track record leading architecture across concurrent initiatives and mentoring architects, technical leads, and engineering teams
- Sound judgement assessing architecture options in terms of business value, risk, cost, delivery impact, and long-term maintainability
- Working knowledge of Agile delivery at scale and ability to work in organisations using both iterative and plan-driven delivery models
Bonus qualifications:
- Deep knowledge of financial services and payments (payment orchestration, clearing and settlement, payment networks, SWIFT, ISO 20022)
- Experience modernising large payment platforms
- Experience with event streaming, event sourcing, CQRS, workflow modelling, API specifications (Kafka, BPMN, OpenAPI, YAML)
- Container platforms and cloud-native architecture (Docker, Kubernetes, public/private/hybrid cloud)
- Distributed data platforms (relational, NoSQL, horizontally scalable databases)
- Architecture visualisation (context, container, sequence, domain, deployment diagrams)
- Platform engineering and delivery practices (infrastructure automation, contract testing, distributed tracing, automated provisioning)
- Infrastructure architecture knowledge (networking, compute, storage, databases, security, middleware, identity, systems management)
