Advisory and Solution Architecture - Executive Director in Glasgow

As a Principal Architect at JPMorganChase within the Corporate Technology team, you are an integral part of a team that works to develop and assist the development of high-quality architecture strategy and solutions for various software applications and platform products. You drive significant business impact and help shape the target state architecture through your capabilities across multiple architecture domains. You will serve as a strategic technology leader, defining and governing end-to-end solution architectures for critical platforms and transformation programs. You will partner closely with CTOs, Chief Architects, and senior engineering leaders to deliver business and technology strategy. Your role blends deep architectural expertise with executive presence, enabling you to influence both business and technology senior stakeholders and provide hands-on guidance to engineering teams as needed. You will help accelerate delivery, embed security and resiliency, and foster a high-performing architecture community.

Job Responsibilities

• Translates business strategy into pragmatic solution roadmaps and reference architectures.
• Drives architecture decisions balancing resilience, scalability, latency, cost, risk, and time-to-market.
• Sets and enforces design principles, patterns, and guardrails across portfolios.
• Chairs or contributes to Architecture Review Boards, ensuring compliance with enterprise standards and regulatory obligations.
• Builds trusted advisor relationships with CTOs, Chief Architects, and senior leaders to co-create technology strategy and execution plans.
• Facilitates outcome-focused dialogue between business, product, and technology leaders to align trade-offs and secure buy-in.
• Guides programs from concept to production, shaping epics and non-functional requirements, and ensuring traceability to business outcomes.
• Provides hands-on oversight and coaching to domain architects and engineering leads, intervening in complex design issues as needed.
• Owns target and transitional architectures for complex, multi-region systems across customer, risk, finance, data, and payments domains.
• Mentors and develops high-performing architects, fostering a community of practice and promoting reusability through reference implementations.

Required Qualifications, Capabilities, And Skills

• Formal experience, training or certification on software engineering concepts and proven experience.
• Significant experience of influencing senior technology leaders at scale in complex, regulated environments (preferably global financial services).
• Proven track record leading architecture for large, distributed, mission-critical systems with 24x7 operations and high resiliency targets.
• Deep expertise in architecture patterns: microservices, event-driven and streaming architectures, API-led connectivity, data mesh/lakehouse, CQRS, and domain-driven design.
• Experience with hyperscale cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), service mesh, CI/CD, IaC, observability, and platform engineering.
• Strong knowledge of real-time streaming (Kafka/Pulsar), batch analytics, MLOps, model governance, and responsible AI patterns.
• Security and resiliency expertise: zero trust, secrets management, identity, encryption, chaos engineering, disaster recovery, and site reliability practices.
• Integration and legacy modernization: messaging, APIs, eventing, SOA-to-microservices transitions, mainframe integration, and strangler-fig approaches.
• Executive presence with ability to simplify complexity and influence outcomes across senior stakeholders in both the business and technology.
• Strong vendor management and build/buy/partner decisioning; experience shaping multi-year investment portfolios.
• Bachelor’s/Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, And Skills

• Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP Architect, TOGAF, CISSP, SAFe).
• Experience in global financial services and regulated environments.
• Hands-on pragmatism; able to review designs and code-level artifacts while maintaining a strategic lens.
• Experience with platform engineering, green software, and confidential computing.
• Strong communication and relationship-building skills across C-suite and engineering teams.
• Experience mentoring and developing architecture talent.
• Familiarity with compliance regimes (e.g., EBA, PRA, OCC, MAS) and architecture support for regulatory requirements.

We are an equal opportunity employer and place a high value on diversity and inclusion at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute, including race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital or veteran status, pregnancy or disability, or any other basis protected under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for applicants’ and employees’ religious practices and beliefs, as well as mental health or physical disability needs.