Principal Architect, Business Capabilities

FAB; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 350,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading UAE bank seeks a Principal Architect to define and manage their business capability landscape, ensuring strategic alignment and transformation. You will leverage modern architectural practices to drive technical excellence and support investment planning. The ideal candidate has deep knowledge in finance sectors and hands-on experience with cloud solutions. Join the team and shape the future of banking by delivering scalable, secure, and high-performance enterprise systems.

Qualifications

• Mastery in defining and structuring business capabilities.
• Ability to align capabilities with strategic goals.
• Experience in wealth management or investment banking.
• Hands-on design of enterprise-scale applications in cloud.
• Proficient in capability taxonomies and promoting reuse.

Responsibilities

• Define and manage the business capability landscape.
• Drive architectural design using modern patterns.
• Maintain traceability between capabilities and business architecture.
• Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities.
• Collaborate with teams for capability mapping and support.

Skills

Business Capability Modeling

Strategic Alignment

Domain knowledge in Wealth Management

Hands-on experience in cloud applications

Governance & Reuse

Portfolio & Roadmap Integration

Architecture Tooling

Cross-Domain Collaboration

Tools

LeanIX

Mega

BizzDesign

Sparx EA

Job description

Principal Architect, Business Capabilities

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and 1 more

Job Description

Overall objectivOes

Overall Objectives:

Define, model, and manage the enterprise’s business capability landscape to support strategic alignment and transformation.

Drive technical excellence in the architectural design of business solutions by leveraging industry best practices, modern architectural patterns (such as microservices, event-driven, and cloud-native architectures), and advanced technologies to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performance enterprise systems.

Serve as the authoritative owner of the capability map and its relationships to processes, journeys, services, and technology.

Ensure capability-centric thinking is embedded across architecture, planning, and delivery practices.

Act as a key integrator between strategy, business design, and IT execution, fostering traceability and reuse.

Enable investment planning, portfolio rationalization, and operating model design through structured capability management.

Role specific responsibilities:

Own and evolve the enterprise business capability map and underlying taxonomy.

Maintain traceability between capabilities and key business architecture views: journeys, processes, value streams, services, and systems.

Conduct capability assessments, maturity reviews, and heatmaps to identify transformation opportunities.

Collaborate with strategy and transformation teams to map target capabilities and support gap analysis.

Align capability changes with business cases, investment proposals, and roadmaps.

Ensure capability information is available and usable in enterprise architecture repositories and planning tools.

Support the definition of target operating models from a capability-centric perspective.

Responsibilities

General functional responsibilities:

Represent capability views in architecture governance forums and strategic planning sessions.

Align with application, data, and solution architects to ensure consistent capability mapping and reuse.

Promote cross-functional understanding and use of capabilities for solution design, sourcing decisions, and platform planning.

Track and report capability maturity, coverage, duplication, and business alignment KPIs.

Mentor architects and business analysts on capability modeling, usage, and evolution practices.

Contribute to the development and maintenance of enterprise architecture practices, with a focus on business modeling discipline

Qualifications

Core competencies required:

Business Capability Modeling: Mastery of defining, decomposing, and structuring capabilities at various abstraction levels.

Strategic Alignment: Ability to align capability evolution with strategic goals, regulatory changes, and business priorities.

Domain knowledge: Demonstrated experience in one or more of the following domains: Wealth Management, Card Services, Trade and Supply Chain Finance, Credit, Custody, or Investment Banking (IB) etc .

Hands‑on: Experience in designing, building and governing enterprise‑scale applications using modern application development frameworks in the cloud (AWS, Azure, OCI, GCP)

Governance & Reuse: Experience in managing capability taxonomies, promoting reuse, and reducing duplication across domains.

Portfolio & Roadmap Integration: Skilled in mapping capabilities to business initiatives, programs, and technology enablers.

Architecture Tooling: Proficiency in modeling tools (e.g., LeanIX, Mega, BizzDesign, Sparx EA) and capability heatmaps.

Cross‑Domain Collaboration: Strong engagement across business, enterprise architecture, and transformation teams.

About Us

About Us:

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is the largest bank in the UAE and one of the world's largest and safest financial institutions. We offer a comprehensive range of personal and private banking services, including credit cards, Islamic banking, investments, loans, and mortgages. Our commitment to excellence and innovation drives us to provide top‑tier financial solutions to our clients.

Life at FAB:

Working at FAB means being part of a team of talented and passionate individuals with a shared vision to support the ambitions of our stakeholders to "Grow Stronger." We embrace the needs of our customers across the globe with a sense of responsibility and confidence driven by extensive expertise that can only be delivered by an ambitious world‑class organization

FAB offers unique career choices, a chance to innovate, craft solutions for the future, and express yourself in a performance‑based culture that will unleash the best in you. Whether you are an experienced professional or just starting your career, FAB provides a range of learning and development initiatives to support all employees through training and skill development.

Our Values:

At FAB, we place our customers at the core of our activities, live our values each day in every way, celebrate achievements, and empower each other to deliver leading solutions. We have structured plans for the recruitment and career progression of Emirati talent to enable them to make a mark in the financial and banking sector both regionally and globaly that rewards your hard work and dedication.

Join our team and be part of a journey to shape the future of banking.