Chief Architect

Bank of London is looking for a Chief Architect to create solutions to our biggest challenges and provide direction to our engineering teams. This is an individual contributor role reporting directly to and working closely with the Chief Technology Officer. Our technology organisation has approximately 30 colleagues, plus a number of third party suppliers, and whilst leadership is expected from the successful candidate, this is not expected to be a position with line management responsibility in the first instance. However, this role is expected to deputise for the CTO, and is expected to be a good step towards a CTO role in the future.

We are a small dynamic company where architecture work has been carried out by the Engineering teams, but given the significant investments in new business capability that are planned, this new role has been created to provide the required capacity to shape major initiatives and provide designs for both internal and third party engineering teams to consume. The role will be based in our London office near Bank, but may involve occasional travel to Belfast and Vilnius, our other strategic locations.

Critical areas of experience are banking domain knowledge, specifically around payments, core banking, and channels. Technical experience is also expected, and the successful candidate is expected to have good knowledge across software, data, infrastructure and security architecture, but the primary skill set is solution architecture and creating end to end solutions that consider all aspects of the design. Our technology is all cloud based, with internally developed channel applications hosted on AWS, and with 3rd party hosted core banking and payments engine.

The role is senior but it is for a detail orientated hands-on practitioner and not a manager who needs someone else to do the work for them. Hands-on doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a ninja software engineer, but you’ll be expected to be writing documents, drawing diagrams, mapping fields, as well as building software prototypes, writing SQL statements, calling APIs, or whatever else might be needed to figure out how to solve problems pragmatically.

As important as the business domain knowledge and technical skills are your communication skills and delivery focus. The environment is fast paced, with a flat structure that promotes rapid decision making and delivery. You’ll work closely with colleagues in Product and Technology, but be expected to deal with all different functions of the bank and our clients to understand their requirements and challenges.

A communicator who is able to work across the bank and with clients to understand business problems and design appropriate solutions.

A technology leader who is able to provide direction to internal and external technology teams.

A domain specialist who understands how banks and payment schemes work and the expectations of clients, colleagues and regulators.

Requirements:

• You are a positive self-starter with excellent communication skills, well-organised, you can establish strong working relationships with a wide variety of customers, peers and stakeholders in a fast-paced young firm.
• Leadership skills and credibility to drive decision making and building consensus.
• A calm approach, with the ability and desire to perform well in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience from working in banking with specific exposure to and understanding of payments eco-system.
• Broad technology experience with experience of designing comprehensive solutions across multiple applications and suppliers.

Work location: London (5 days per week in the office). Travel to other locations may be required on occasion.

Diversity: Bank of London is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusion, diversity and belonging. All qualified applicants are welcome and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, age, religion or religious expression, sex, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity and expression, transgender, national origin, or military veteran status.