Lead Solution Architect

Mastercard; London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading payment technology company in London is seeking a Lead Solution Architect to design robust architectural frameworks. This role involves collaborating with engineering teams and ensuring compliance with security standards. Ideal candidates should have strong background in data science and enterprise software delivery, with experience in cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. This role requires a mix of remote and office presence.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a senior engineer with enterprise-grade software delivery.
• Understanding of modern service design approaches.
• Familiarity with data protection standards like PCI DSS and GDPR.

Responsibilities

• Draft architectures and discuss with stakeholders.
• Ensure compliance with Mastercard’s standards.
• Collaborate on MLOps pipelines and workflows.

Skills

Architectural design

Data science techniques

Cloud-native technologies

API specifications

Event-driven systems

DevOps practices

Tools

Kubernetes

NoSQL databases

Job description

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart, and accessible. Our technology, innovation, partnerships, and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses, and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Lead Solution Architect Overview

We are looking for a solution architect to join an award-winning team with a proven track record of combining data science techniques with an understanding of payments data to aid Financial Institutions in their fight against money laundering and fraud. Headquartered in The City of London, we craft bespoke services that help our clients understand the underlying criminal behavior driving financial crime, empowering them to take action.

As part of the Architecture function, your role will focus on creating and maintaining architectural frameworks, understanding product requirements, translating them into designs for engineering teams, and presenting solution requirements to Platform Architecture. You will ensure designs meet Mastercard’s technology and security standards and will present them during architecture reviews. You will actively assess architectural changes and new technologies. Your role will be global, designing products and deployment strategies regionally.

Role

1. Draft architectures following design principles and discuss them with technical and non-technical stakeholders (Engineering, Platform, Product, Data Science, etc.).
2. Ensure compliance of solution designs with Mastercard’s technology and security standards and policies.
3. Support the engineering team in progressing software through reviews.
4. Collaborate with engineering and data science teams to design and implement MLOps pipelines and feature workflows for scalable, secure deployment of machine learning models.
5. Work with platform architects to ensure proper infrastructure sizing, deployment strategies, performance, resilience, and cost-efficiency.
6. Define and maintain API specifications.
7. Assist with architectural design assessments for product evolution.
8. Evaluate technologies, software options, and architecture to align with business goals.
9. Share architectural designs with cross-functional leads to support estimations and development.
10. Design for resilience and reliability of services.
11. Improve customer experience of services/products.
12. Drive architectural design, including dependencies, service interactions, and policies.
13. Address technical concerns and recommend innovations to enhance market readiness.
14. Use judgment to balance trade-offs among competing interests.
15. Present solution designs in review meetings and resolve enterprise challenges and regulatory needs.
16. Develop understanding of end-to-end architecture and dependencies.
17. Design for optimal performance and resilience.
18. This role is hybrid, based in central London, requiring attendance at the office as per Mastercard policy, including team days on Monday and Thursday.

All About You

• You enjoy designing products to solve real problems for customers and working in a team.
• You are interested in data science and deploying algorithms as products.
• You are detail-oriented, experienced in drafting and discussing architectural designs.
• You have a strong background as a senior engineer with enterprise-grade software delivery experience.
• You have built and maintained distributed, high-throughput, low-latency solutions using cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes.
• You have experience with event-driven systems, asynchronous workflows, and scalable service interactions.
• You understand database optimization, API standards, and industry best practices.
• You are interested in modern service design approaches, including containers, streaming platforms, and NoSQL stores.
• You understand DevOps practices and are comfortable communicating with diverse stakeholders.
• You have experience deploying machine learning models operationally.
• You have or are keen to gain experience in payments, fraud, or money laundering domains.
• You understand enterprise software delivery, architecture decisions, and cloud cost analysis.
• You can articulate complex architecture patterns and understand operational testing practices.
• You are familiar with data protection standards like PCI DSS and GDPR.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving Mastercard assets, information, and networks pose inherent risks. Every employee must:

• Abide by security policies and practices;
• Maintain confidentiality and integrity of information;
• Report security violations or breaches;
• Complete mandatory security training.