Finance Enterprise Architect

About Unity Advisory

Unity Advisory is a pragmatic, outcome-focused advisory firm that bridges strategy and execution, supporting CFOs and finance leaders through transformation, transactions, and scaling journeys. This is a client-facing role within our AI Advisory team, giving clients a coherent architecture across data, applications, AI, and infrastructure that connects their technology decisions to business outcomes.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Finance Enterprise Architect to shape the technology architecture of the finance function across our AI Advisory engagements. This is a senior, strategic, client-facing role that pairs deep understanding of the finance operating model with enough technical depth to stay credible with engineers and hands-on teams. You will define how finance systems, data, and AI capabilities fit together across a client's finance landscape — from ERP and EPM through to reporting, planning, and AI-enabled workflows — align architecture to the CFO's commercial priorities, and guide delivery teams through the trade-offs. As a Senior Manager, you will own architectural direction on engagements, act as a trusted advisor to the CFO and senior finance stakeholders, and be accountable for designs that are implementable, scalable, and commercially sound.

Key Responsibilities

• Define enterprise and solution architectures that align applications, data, AI, and infrastructure to clients' business and finance priorities.
• Design the finance systems landscape and integration patterns across ERP, EPM, consolidation, planning, treasury, tax, and reporting tools, alongside internal products and AI services.
• Provide architectural direction for applied AI/ML in finance — where AI creates measurable value across close, reporting, FP&A, and controls, how agentic and workflow patterns fit the estate, and how solutions integrate safely.
• Establish standards for security, compliance, controls, and operability across the finance architecture, including segregation of duties and alignment to frameworks such as ISO 27001.
• Define programme-level approaches to AI quality and responsible operation at scale — evaluation, monitoring, confidence scoring, human-in-the-loop review, and graceful degradation.
• Balance speed, cost, security, and long-term maintainability, and articulate these trade-offs in commercial terms for CFOs, transformation directors, and senior sponsors.
• Translate ambiguous, cross-domain problems into clear target-state architectures and phased, deliverable roadmaps.
• Guide and mentor data engineers, data architects, and delivery teams, ensuring designs are coherent and actually get built.
• Contribute reusable reference architectures, methodologies, and accelerators that strengthen the wider AI Advisory practice.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• Substantial experience as an enterprise, solution, or technical architect, with evidence of architectures that have been delivered and operated in production.
• Strong understanding of the finance function — operating model, core processes (R2R, P2P, O2C, FP&A, treasury, tax, controls), and the systems that support them.
• Hands-on knowledge of the finance systems landscape (ERP, EPM/consolidation, planning, and reporting platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Workday, NetSuite, Anaplan, OneStream) and how they integrate.
• Breadth across data, applications, integration, cloud, and AI, with enough depth to earn engineers' trust.
• Fluency with at least one major cloud provider (AWS or Azure) and enterprise integration patterns.
• System-level design judgement on where AI belongs in a finance estate: agentic versus deterministic workflow patterns, tool orchestration, and model routing or cascade architectures.
• Strong client-facing communication: able to act as a trusted advisor to the CFO and senior finance stakeholders and to frame technology decisions in commercial terms.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and compressed timescales with a high degree of ownership.

Strong Preference

• Experience architecting AI-enabled solutions across complex enterprise or client estates.
• Informed, current views on production AI trade-offs — fine-tuning versus RAG versus long-context, context window economics, and prompt caching — and their architectural and cost implications.
• Understanding of MCP and composable AI system design, and how to integrate AI capabilities across existing enterprise systems.
• Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor), with a clear view of their strengths and limits in delivery.
• Consulting or advisory background, owning problems end-to-end.
• Security and compliance experience (e.g. ISO 27001 alignment, identity and access design).
• Track record introducing reusable architecture patterns or accelerators.

Nice to Have

• Evidence of self-directed building — side projects, internal tools, or startups.
• Exposure to finance transformation, PE/M&A, or portfolio-company environments.
• Relevant certifications (e.g. AWS/Azure architect-level, TOGAF, CISSP).

Additional Information

At Unity Advisory, we are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. In line with the Equality Act 2010, we will accommodate any suitable candidate requiring assistance to attend or conduct an interview. If you need any adjustments or support, please let us know when scheduling your interview or in your application cover letter. We are dedicated to ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed and are here to support you throughout the process.

PLEASE NOTE: We do not accept unsolicited CVs from third-party agencies.