Principal Architect

Fintua Limited; Leinster; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working policy

Remote/office hybrid options

Volunteer day

Extensive benefits package

Job summary

Fintua Limited is seeking a Principal Platform Architect to own the architectural integrity of our fintech platform, spanning new design and modernization of existing systems. You will drive a unified approach to data, APIs, and integrations while reducing debt and fragmentation across products and markets.

You will lead architecture strategy and guardrails, ensuring secure, scalable, and auditable solutions across the enterprise.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering with 5+ years in an architect role.
• Proven fintech system architecture experience and data governance exposure.
• Strong communication to technical and executive audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end solution architecture for new and existing products.
• Define target-state architecture and migration paths with minimal live disruption.
• Lead API strategy, governance, and integration patterns.
• Drive unified data lake/data platform architecture and governance.
• Mentor engineers and maintain architecture documentation.

Skills

Solution architecture

Cloud architecture (AWS)

API design & integration

Distributed systems

Security & compliance

Education

TOGAF 9/10, AWS/GCP/Azure Architect, CISSP

Tools

Data lake/warehouse

IaC (Infrastructure as Code)

Job description

Fintua is a global leader in indirect tax compliance and tax technology. Our all-in-one platform streamlines global VAT compliance, recovery, eInvoicing and payments, helping businesses navigate the complex indirect tax landscape with ease and confidence.

Fintua is part of CluneTech, a suite of companies providing cutting-edge solutions that simplify global business. We have been recognised as a Great Place to Work for 11 consecutive years, a Best Workplace for Women for the past 7 years and most recently, a Best Workplace in Tech for the past 6 years.

This role requires a minimum of 2 days per week in our Kilkenny office.

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Platform Architect to own the technical vision and architectural integrity of our fintech platform — spanning both new solution design and existing systems already in production. This is a dual mandate: architect greenfield capabilities while simultaneously rationalising and modernising what's already built, so the platform grows as one coherent system rather than a collection of point solutions.

You'll be the primary technical authority ensuring that as we expand — new products, new markets, new acquisitions, new integrations — the platform stays unified, secure, and maintainable rather than accumulating fragmentation and technical debt.

A central focus of this role is seamless integration: making sure new and legacy solutions interoperate cleanly, share common data and identity models, and are built (or refactored) against a consistent set of architectural standards. You will also lead the strategy and implementation path toward a shared data lake / data platform, giving individual solutions across the combined platform governed, real-time access to underlying client data — eliminating duplicated data stores, inconsistent client views, and brittle point-to-point integrations between systems.

The Principal Platform Architect owns architecture strategy, standards and target-state design. Engineering Leads remain accountable for delivery execution and team management

What You'll Do

Unified platform architecture (new + existing)

• Own end-to-end solution architecture across both new product initiatives and existing production systems, ensuring one coherent architectural vision rather than parallel, disconnected roadmaps
• Assess existing solutions (in-house and acquired/inherited) to identify architectural debt, integration gaps, and duplicated capabilities; define and prioritise a remediation roadmap
• Design new solutions to be integration-ready and debt-conscious from day one — avoiding the creation of tomorrow's legacy problems
• Define target-state architecture and phased migration paths that move legacy systems toward the target state without disrupting live operations
• Establish and enforce architectural guardrails — new and existing — must design against
• Define and drive architectural standards for AI and agentic capabilities across model integration, observability, auditability, security, and responsible AI controls, ensuring solutions are secure, well-engineered, and consistently designed across the enterprise.

Technical debt reduction

• Build and maintain a technical debt register/inventory across the platform, with clear ownership, risk scoring, and business impact tied to each item
• Champion technical debt reduction as a first-class priority in planning cycles, not an afterthought — balancing it explicitly against new feature delivery
• Identify and eliminate redundant systems, data stores, and integration patterns as new solutions come online, rather than letting them accumulate alongside old ones
• Define "definition of done" standards that prevent new debt (test coverage, documentation, decoupling, observability) as part of every solution delivered

Integration (internal and external)

• Design the integration layer connecting internal solutions to each other and to external parties
• Establish consistent integration patterns (API-first) to replace ad hoc, point-to-point connections between systems
• Own API strategy and governance across the platform, ensuring internal and external interfaces are consistent, versioned, secure, and well-documented
• Act as the technical lead for evaluating and onboarding new external integrations and partners, assessing architectural and security fit before commitments are made

Data lake / shared data platform

• Define the architecture and roadmap for a shared data lake enabling every solution on the combined platform to access underlying client data through governed, consistent interfaces
• Design the data model, ingestion pipelines, and access patterns so individual solutions can read (and where appropriate, write) shared client data without duplicating or forking it
• Establish data governance, lineage, access control, and privacy-by-design controls for shared client data, in line with financial regulatory requirements
• Partner with Engineering, Product and Info Sec to define standards for data quality, consent management, and cross-border data handling where applicable
• Drive migration of solutions currently holding siloed/duplicated client data onto the shared data layer, in a phased and low-risk manner

Governance, compliance & leadership

• Architect for high availability, fault tolerance, and low-latency transaction processing at scale
• Lead architectural reviews, set design standards, and ensure consistency across engineering teams working on new and legacy solutions alike
• Mentor senior and staff engineers; act as technical escalation point for complex, cross-team, cross-system problems
• Produce and maintain architecture documentation, decision records, a technical debt register, and system/data-flow diagrams
• Support due diligence, audits, and regulatory examinations with clear technical documentation of both current and target-state architecture
• Stay current on emerging fintech technology trends and assess their applicability

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 15+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in a solution/enterprise architect role
• Proven experience architecting systems in fintech
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, and API design
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferably) and infrastructure-as-code
• Strong knowledge of financial industry compliance and security standards (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR or equivalent)
• Experience designing for high-throughput, low-latency, transactional systems requiring strong consistency and auditability
• Excellent communication skills, with experience presenting architecture decisions to technical, executive and even high level customer audiences
• Experience with database technologies spanning relational, NoSQL, and event-streaming systems
• Demonstrated track record of modernising or migrating legacy systems while they remain live in production, without disrupting the business
• Hands-on experience designing integration layers across heterogeneous systems (internal platforms, acquired systems, external vendors/partners) using event-driven and API-first patterns
• Experience designing or implementing a data lake, data warehouse, or shared data platform including governance, access control, and lineage
• Demonstrated ability to identify, quantify, and drive down technical debt at an organisational level — not just within a single team or codebase
• Working knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks and models (e.g. TOGAF, Zachman, or equivalent), and experience applying them to structure architecture practice — governance, architecture vision, target-state definition, transition/migration planning — in a real engineering organisation

Preferred:

• Prior experience in a scale-up fintech environment, including legacy-to-cloud migrations and post-acquisition platform integration
• Experience with data mesh or federated data governance models across multiple product teams
• Experience with containerization and orchestration
• Familiarity with master data management or customer 360 initiatives in a regulated data environment
• Relevant certifications (TOGAF 9/10, AWS/GCP/Azure Architect, CISSP, Data Engineering/Architecture certifications)

Recognised as a both a Great Place to Work and Deloitte Best Managed Company, we believe that recognition goes much deeper than just financial rewards. Therefore, in addition to a competitive salary, we also offer an exclusive benefits package that includes:

• Competitive pension
• Flexible Working Policy with a combination of remote and office working and a flexible approach to working hours
• Competitive annual leave and a number of other leaves including IVF, compassion, marriage, maternity and paternity leave
• Employee-led CSR Programme, CluneTech Cares, with one paid Volunteer Day per year
• Death in Service Benefit
• Milestone Recognition Programme
• Professional & Personal Development
• Rewards & Recognition
• Employee Wellbeing Programme, CluneTech Life

Fintua is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees. We are committed to building and maintaining a culture which is free from discrimination and harassment and where all employees can bring their best selves to work.