Card Solutions Architects - Contract role - Sheffield - Immediate

• Own and deliver end-to-end solution architecture for card-based systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles and platform roadmaps
• Translate business requirements (BRDs) into solution designs, decomposing into MVPs, epics, and detailed technical stories
• Design and implement scalable, resilient, and secure architectures across distributed systems
• Define integration patterns (REST APIs, messaging, event-driven architecture) across internal platforms and external partners
• Provide hands-on architectural leadership to engineering teams, ensuring design consistency and adherence to standards
• Govern solutions through architecture review boards, ensuring compliance with security, data, and infrastructure standards
• Identify and mitigate technical risks, including performance, scalability, and security concerns
• Collaborate with vendors and third parties to define interoperability models and integration contracts
• Contribute to technology strategy, including cloud adoption, modernization, and legacy transformation initiatives
• Promote adoption of modern engineering practices including microservices, API-first design, and domain-driven design

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering and solution architecture, with a strong focus on banking and payments systems
• Deep domain knowledge of card processing systems (e.g., authorization, clearing, settlement, dispute management)
• Proven experience designing high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems
• Experience operating within large-scale, matrixed enterprise environments
• Strong background in cloud-native architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including relevant certifications
• Demonstrated ability to handle complex, ambiguous technical problems and translate them into structured solutions
• Strong stakeholder engagement across business, engineering, and infrastructure teams

Technical Skills

• Architecture & Design: Microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design (DDD), layered architecture
• Integration: RESTful APIs, OpenAPI specs, messaging systems (Kafka, MQ), asynchronous processing
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Cloud-native design, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines
• Data: Distributed data systems, RDBMS/NoSQL, data modelling, data consistency patterns
• Security: Secure-by-design principles, IAM, encryption, threat modelling, regulatory compliance
• Resilience: High availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, observability (logging, monitoring, tracing)
• Channels: Experience designing across web, mobile, API gateways, and backend orchestration layers
• Legacy Integration: Exposure to mainframe systems (desirable but not essential)

Additional Capabilities

• Strong focus on cybersecurity and secure architecture practices
• Experience designing mission-critical systems with strict uptime and performance SLAs
• Ability to mentor engineers and architects, driving technical best practices and governance
• Comfortable working across global teams with distributed stakeholders