Principal Solution Architect

As a Principal Solution Architect, you will shape and oversee the end-to-end architecture of a modern payments platform built on microservices. You will provide technical leadership across product and engineering teams, turn business strategy into a clear architectural roadmap, and ensure that solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, easy to integrate, and aligned with enterprise standards.

What you will be doing

Own the 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, and maintain technology roadmaps that guide platform modernisation and investment decisions.

Turn business, product, regulatory, security, and operational needs into clear architecture principles, solution designs, and practical guidance for delivery teams.

Lead architecture governance by creating and reviewing solution proposals, architecture decisions, interface specifications, and other key design documents.

Define clear responsibilities for services and establish integration patterns for APIs, event-driven messaging, and batch processing.

Ensure that solutions meet demanding requirements for resilience, availability, performance, scalability, observability, security, operability, upgradeability, and backward compatibility.

Work with senior leaders and colleagues across product management, engineering, security, operations, and client-facing teams to resolve cross-functional trade-offs and align priorities.

Provide architectural leadership for strategic client engagements, proposals, and complex implementations, presenting options and recommendations to technical and executive audiences.

Support multiple delivery teams during implementation, confirm that solutions follow agreed designs, and address significant departures from the target architecture or enterprise standards.

Mentor architects and senior engineers, strengthen architecture practices across the organisation, and serve as a recognised authority on payments and platform architecture.

What you will need

Extensive experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale software platforms throughout the development lifecycle, from iterative delivery to production deployment.

Proven experience leading the 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, including data consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, circuit breaking, asynchronous processing, and backward-compatible change.

Strong technical expertise in Java and JVM-based enterprise platforms, relational databases such as 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 clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Track record of leading architecture across several concurrent initiatives and mentoring architects, technical leads, and engineering teams.

Sound judgement when assessing architecture options in terms of business value, risk, cost, delivery impact, and long-term maintainability.

Working knowledge of Agile delivery at scale and the ability to work effectively in organisations that use both iterative and plan-driven delivery models.

Bonus if you have

Deep knowledge of financial services and payments, including payment orchestration, clearing and settlement, payment networks, SWIFT, and ISO 20022.

Experience modernising large payment platforms and defining clear responsibilities across payment initiation, payment execution, and integration services.

Experience with event streaming, event sourcing, command query responsibility segregation (CQRS), workflow modelling, and API specifications, using technologies or standards such as Kafka, BPMN, OpenAPI, and YAML.

Experience with container platforms and cloud-native architecture, including Docker, Kubernetes, and public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

Knowledge of distributed data platforms, including relational, NoSQL, and horizontally scalable databases.

Experience creating architecture views such as context, container, sequence, domain, and deployment diagrams.

Understanding of platform engineering and delivery practices such as infrastructure automation, contract testing, end-to-end testing across products, distributed tracing, and automated provisioning.

Broad knowledge of infrastructure architecture, including networking, compute, storage, databases, security, middleware, identity, and systems management.

What we offer you:

A career at FIS is more than just a job. It’s the change to shape the future of fintech. At FIS, we offer you:

A voice in the future of fintech

Always-on learning and development

Collaborative work environment

Opportunities to give back

Competitive salary and benefits