Card Solutions Architects - Contract role - Sheffield - Immediate

We are seeking two highly experienced and SeniorSolution Architects with deep expertise in card processing platforms to drive architecture and design across a large-scale commercial cards ecosystem.

• Own and deliver end-to-end solution architecture for card-based systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles and platform roadmaps

• Translate business requirements (BRDs) into solution designs, decomposing into MVPs, epics, and detailed technical stories

• Design and implement scalable, resilient, and secure architectures across distributed systems

• Define integration patterns (REST APIs, messaging, event-driven architecture) across internal platforms and external partners

• Provide hands-on architectural leadership to engineering teams, ensuring design consistency and adherence to standards

• Govern solutions through architecture review boards, ensuring compliance with security, data, and infrastructure standards

• Identify and mitigate technical risks, including performance, scalability, and security concerns

• Collaborate with vendors and third parties to define interoperability models and integration contracts

• Contribute to technology strategy, including cloud adoption, modernization, and legacy transformation initiatives

• Promote adoption of modern engineering practices including microservices, API-first design, and domain-driven design

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering and solution architecture, with a strong focus on banking and payments systems

• Deep domain knowledge of card processing systems (e.g., authorization, clearing, settlement, dispute management)

• Proven experience designing high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems

• Experience operating within large-scale, matrixed enterprise environments

• Strong background in cloud-native architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including relevant certifications

• Demonstrated ability to handle complex, ambiguous technical problems and translate them into structured solutions

• Strong stakeholder engagement across business, engineering, and infrastructure teams

• Architecture & Design: Microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design (DDD), layered architecture

• Integration: RESTful APIs, OpenAPI specs, messaging systems (Kafka, MQ), asynchronous processing

• Cloud & Infrastructure: Cloud-native design, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines

• Data: Distributed data systems, RDBMS/NoSQL, data modelling, data consistency patterns

• Security: Secure-by-design principles, IAM, encryption, threat modelling, regulatory compliance

• Resilience: High availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, observability (logging, monitoring, tracing)

• Channels: Experience designing across web, mobile, API gateways, and backend orchestration layers

• Legacy Integration: Exposure to mainframe systems (desirable but not essential)

• Strong focus on cybersecurity and secure architecture practices

• Experience designing mission-critical systems with strict uptime and performance SLAs

• Ability to mentor engineers and architects, driving technical best practices and governance

• Comfortable working across global teams with distributed stakeholders