Principal Architect

Role Overview

• Define and maintain the architectural vision across our core systems, balancing technical correctness with pragmatic delivery
• Lead architectural decisions company-wide, from high-level system design through to component-level tradeoffs
• Establish and enforce coding standards and development standards that raise the quality bar across the engineering organisation
• Produce architectural documentation that is precise, opinionated, and actually used by the teams building against it
• Serve as the internal authority on payment systems architecture, real-time financial processing, ledger design, and card scheme integrations
• Drive architectural decisions across acquiring, issuing, FX, clearing, and settlement systems with deep domain knowledge
• Anticipate the technical implications of regulatory, scheme, and processor requirements and design ahead of them
• Identify architectural risk in financial systems before it becomes an operational incident
• Own system-level performance, scalability, and reliability as architectural concerns, not afterthoughts
• Define the right tradeoffs between consistency, availability, latency, and cost across different system domains
• Go deep where it matters, down to data model design, field-level decisions, and protocol-level behaviour, and connect that detail back to the broader architecture
• Set the standard for how the engineering organisation thinks about distributed systems, failure modes, and recovery
• Lead technical evaluation and oversight of vendors, processors, and third-party platforms
• Engage external partners with enough depth to challenge their recommendations and hold them to the right technical bar
• Translate vendor capabilities and constraints into architectural decisions with clear rationale
• Mentor and influence senior engineers and tech leads across teams, elevating how the organisation approaches system design
• Review and challenge architectural proposals from engineering teams, providing structured and direct feedback
• Over time, build and lead a small group of architects as the function matures

Requirements

• Payments domain expert. You have deep, hands-on experience designing real-time financial systems. You understand ledger architecture, card scheme mechanics, payment processing pipelines, and the operational constraints that come with them. This is not negotiable.
• Software architect, not solutions architect. You have written production-grade code and scaled complex systems. Your architectural credibility comes from having built things, not from having advised on them.
• Top-to-bottom systems thinker. You move fluidly between system-level architecture and the lowest levels of implementation detail. You are as comfortable debating a data field type or an API contract as you are designing a distributed settlement system. Nothing is too high level or too granular for you to engage with rigorously.
• Strong documentation instinct. You write clearly and precisely. Your architecture docs, design reviews, and technical decisions are thorough, structured, and built to outlast the conversation that produced them. You treat documentation as part of the work, not a follow-up task.
• Technically opinionated. You have strong views on coding standards, system design patterns, and development practices, and you can articulate and defend them clearly. You do not produce wishy-washy recommendations.
• Vendor-savvy. You have engaged payment processors, card schemes, and infrastructure vendors at a technical level. You know when a vendor is right and when they need to be pushed back on.
• Clear communicator. You can explain a complex architectural decision to the engineering team or senior stakeholders including C-Suite without changing what you actually think.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems
• Go