Solutions Architect

About This Role

Company Description

Wonnpay is a crypto-native payment network built for global citizens, high-value individuals, and mobile-first entrepreneurs. Our mission is to make transactions smarter, faster, and more secure by providing innovative payment solutions that streamline financial operations and empower businesses to grow. Focused on adapting to the evolving needs of modern commerce, Wonnpay delivers scalable and efficient digital payment infrastructures. Driven by technology and a commitment to trust, we help partners succeed in the rapidly changing world of finance.

Role Description

We are seeking an accomplished Solution Architect with deep, hands-on AWS expertise and a strong background in engineering leadership to join our growing FinTech organisation based in the UAE. This is a senior-level hybrid role where you will shape the technical vision, drive cloud architecture decisions, and mentor engineering teams delivering mission-critical financial products at scale. The ideal candidate brings a rare blend of strategic thinking and technical depth — someone who can architect enterprise-grade AWS solutions, engage directly with C-suite 

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture & Design

▸ Architect end-to-end AWS-native solutions aligned with FinTech regulatory requirements and UAE data residency obligations (CBUAE,VARA, ADGM, DIFC frameworks).

▸ Define and enforce cloud architecture standards, reference architectures, and guardrails across multi-account AWS environments.

▸ Lead design reviews, threat modelling sessions, and architectural governance for new initiatives and platform migrations.

▸ Drive adoption of serverless, containerised (EKS/ECS), and event-driven architectures across payment, lending, and digital banking platforms.

Engineering Leadership

▸ Serve as a technical authority and mentor for engineering squads, elevating team capability through pairing, code reviews, and architectural coaching.

▸ Partner with VP Engineering and CTO to translate business strategy into actionable technical roadmaps. ▸ Lead and contribute hands-on to proof-of-concepts, critical path deliverables, and platform-level engineering work.

▸ Establish and champion engineering best practices — GitOps, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as code, and observability standards.

Stakeholder & Delivery Management

▸ Act as a trusted technical advisor to product, business, and regulatory stakeholders, communicating complex architecture in accessible terms.

▸ Collaborate with third-party vendors, cloud partners, and system integrators to evaluate and onboard technology solutions.

▸ Own architecture decision records (ADRs) and ensure documentation is accurate, current, and discoverable.

▸ Support pre-sales and solution scoping engagements where technical credibility is critical.

Security, Compliance & Reliability

▸ Ensure all architecture adheres to PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and UAE Central Bank technology risk guidelines.

▸ Define SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets; implement chaos engineering and disaster recovery playbooks.

▸ Conduct regular architecture audits and Well-Architected Framework reviews across AWS workloads.

Required Qualifications Experience

▸ Minimum 5 years of hands-on, production-grade AWS cloud architecture experience (non negotiable). ▸ Minimum 8 years of total software engineering or infrastructure experience, with 3+ years in a formal technical leadership role.

▸ Proven experience within the FinTech, banking, payments, or financial services sector.

▸ Demonstrated track record of delivering large-scale distributed systems in regulated environments.

▸ Prior experience working in the UAE or GCC region is strongly preferred.

AWS Certification (Mandatory) AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional AWS Certified Security – Specialty At least one AWS Professional-level certification is mandatory. Additional specialty certifications (Security, Networking, Database) are a significant advantage.

Technical Skills

▸ Compute: Core AWS services:

▸ EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Auto Scaling Groups — deep operational expertise.

▸ Networking & Security: ▸ VPC design, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, Security Hub, IAM, KMS. ▸ Data & Messaging:

▸ RDS (Aurora), DynamoDB, ElastiCache, MSK (Kafka), SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis.

▸ DevOps & IaC:

▸ Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Helm.

▸ Observability: ▸ CloudWatch, X-Ray, Datadog, OpenTelemetry — SRE practices and on-call culture.

▸ Languages & APIs: ▸ Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Java, Go, Node.js) and RESTful/GraphQL/ gRPC API design patterns.

Preferred Qualifications

▸ Experience with open banking standards (PSD2, OBIE) or UAE Open Finance Framework.

▸ Familiarity with SWIFT, ISO 20022, payment scheme integrations (Visa/Mastercard APIs, local UAE payment rails). ▸ Exposure to AI/ML workloads on AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock) within financial applications. ▸ Experience designing for multi-region active-active or active-passive architectures for 99.99%+ availability SLAs.

▸ TOGAF, SABSA, or other enterprise/security architecture frameworks certification.

Work Setup:

• Hybrid