Solution Architecture Lead

We're excited to be partnering with a leading institution in the UAE that is building a digital-first, AI-enabled financial services organisation from the ground up. This is a unique opportunity to join at an early stage and help shape the technology, integration, and AI foundations of a business with significant institutional backing and long-term ambition. As Solution Architecture Lead, you will be responsible for translating business and product requirements into scalable, secure, and deliverable solution designs across a modern technology landscape. Working closely with Architecture, Engineering, Data & AI, Product, and delivery partners, you'll play a key role in designing the platforms, integrations, and customer journeys that will underpin a next-generation financial services organisation. Key Responsibilities • Lead end-to-end solution architecture across applications, integrations, cloud, infrastructure, data, security, and business processes. • Design and deliver solutions across key domains including payments, channels, customer engagement, cards, treasury, and operational platforms. • Define integration patterns using APIs, event-driven architecture, streaming technologies, and emerging agent-based protocols. • Build working prototypes and proofs-of-value to validate architectural decisions and reduce delivery risk. • Work closely with engineering teams and system integrators to carry designs through implementation and into production. • Review and challenge vendor and partner solution designs to ensure alignment with architectural standards and business objectives. • Design secure, resilient, and highly available solutions with strong consideration for auditability, regulatory requirements, and operational resilience. • Contribute to AI-enabled solutions, including agentic workflows, AI-assisted processes, and intelligent automation where they create measurable business value. Required Experience - 8+ years in solution architecture within banking or financial services, with a track record of designs delivered to production, not just approved. - Deep, practical grounding in solution architecture methodology and design practice — architecture views, decision records, non-functional requirements engineering, and trade-off analysis — applied consistently across complex, multi-vendor delivery. - Solution design experience across core banking, payments, or treasury platforms, including working at implementation depth with system integrators and vendors. - Strong grounding in modern architecture across infrastructure, platform, application, data, and security domains (Azure preferred): Kubernetes-based platforms, event-driven and API integration, zero-trust and identity patterns, resilience design. - Experience in a regulated environment: designing for auditability and producing design evidence for reviews and regulatory engagements. - A record of landing complex, contested design decisions with senior engineering, product, and vendor stakeholders in delivery-pressured environments. - Demonstrable hands-on capability with the modern AI stack — LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and AI-assisted engineering tools — is highly valued and a genuine differentiator, though banking domain depth and solution architecture rigor take precedence over AI experience alone. Technical Proficiencies - Solution architecture craft and methodology: end-to-end design across application, data, integration, infrastructure, security, and business process views; C4 model or 4+1 view practice; architecture decision records; non-functional requirements engineering; and structured trade-off analysis. - Proficient on using architecture design and modelling tools for producing and maintaining design-as-code artefacts. - Banking platforms: solution-level understanding of modern core banking systems, payment hubs, and treasury platforms and their integration surfaces. - Integration design: event streaming, API design and management, schema and contract governance (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI/CloudEvents), agent integration protocols (MCP and comparable). - Security architecture: zero-trust and identity patterns (human and non-human), threat modelling, data protection, and DevSecOps practice. - Cloud and platform: Azure services, Kubernetes-based deployment, platform engineering and internal developer platforms, observability, and resilience/DR design. - Modern data architecture: event and streaming data patterns, data platform/lakehouse design, and data contracts. - AI solution engineering: LLM APIs and orchestration, agent frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context engineering, evaluation harnesses, and AI-assisted development tooling. Qualifications & Certifications (Preferred) - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline. (Required) - Solution/enterprise architecture certifications. (Required) - Demonstrated hands-on experience with architecture design and modelling tooling, as set out above. (Required) - Master's degree or other advanced postgraduate qualification. (Preferred) - Cloud solution architecture certification (e.g. Azure Solutions Architect Expert) and/or a security architecture certification (e.g. CISSP, SABSA). (Preferred)

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