Head of Architecture — AI-Driven Payments Platform

Consult; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Referment is partnering with a regulated UK bank to lead end-to-end enterprise architecture from London, guiding transformation to an AI-enabled operating model. You will own current, transitional and target architectures across business, data, application and technology, and lead a team of enterprise and domain architects through the change, delivering measurable value and governance.

You'll define reference architectures, standards and modular work packages, modernising the function with

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading an architecture function in transformation-heavy environments.
• Deep expertise in payments, FX or other high-scale transaction-processing platforms.
• Hands-on experience architecting distributed, event-driven, microservices-oriented systems.
• Strong communication and stakeholder influencing skills with senior leadership.
• Experience across modern and legacy technologies, including defining modernisation pathways.
• Familiarity with governance in regulated environments.
• A technical degree.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and develop a team of enterprise and domain architects, raising engineering practice and capability maturity.
• Shape strategic technology roadmaps alongside senior stakeholders, identifying transformational opportunities across payments, FX, data, AI and platform domains.
• Lead complex, multi-disciplinary change across legacy and modern systems, driving architectural simplification and scalable patterns.
• Champion event-driven, microservices-based, cloud-native architectures, governing decisions pragmatically to balance innovation, technical debt and regulatory expectations.
• Work closely with engineering and change teams to translate architectural intent into practical execution frameworks and incremental, measurable value.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior executives on strategic technology decisions and business-architecture alignment.

Skills

Leadership

Payments/FX domain

Event-driven

Cloud-native

Stakeholder management

Regulatory governance

Architecture alignment

Education

Technical degree

Tools

TOGAF

ArchiMate

Job description

Referment is partnering with a regulated UK bank to lead end-to-end enterprise architecture from London, guiding transformation to an AI-enabled operating model. You will own current, transitional and target architectures across business, data, application and technology, and lead a team of enterprise and domain architects through the change, delivering measurable value and governance.

You'll define reference architectures, standards and modular work packages, modernising the function with