Head of Architecture & Platform Engineering

What will you contribute?

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will lead the architecture, modernization, and scalability of Finastra's Lending technology platform. As the Head of Lending Architecture & Platform Engineering, you will define the technology vision and architectural strategy for Lending products, driving platform transformation, cloud adoption, AI enablement, and engineering excellence. This role combines strategic leadership with deep technical expertise to ensure the delivery of secure, scalable, and high-performing SaaS solutions that support business growth and innovation.

Responsibilities & Deliverables:

Your deliverables as a Head of Lending Architecture & Platform Engineering will include, but are not limited to, the following:

Technology & Architecture Leadership

• Define and own the overall architectural vision, technical strategy, and long-term scalability of the platform.

• Establish and enforce architectural principles, patterns, and governance across lending engineering teams.

• Drive modernization of legacy systems, including re-architecture, cloud migration, refactoring toward microservices or modular architectures.

Platform Engineering

• Lead the development of shared platform services, frameworks, and tooling that support all product teams (e.g., identity, observability, CI/CD, logging, infrastructure as code).

• Build and scale internal platforms that improve developer productivity, system performance, and operational efficiency.

• Partner with central teams to enforce security, resilience, and compliance at the platform level.

AI Enablement

• Collaborate with the chief AI officer team and lead the definition of the framework and patterns needed to operationalize AI models in Lending products

• Establish architectural guardrails for model training, inference, explainability, and performance at scale.

• Ensure AI components are standardized, secure, compliant, and cost effective across Lending products and environments (on-prem, cloud)

• Drive the adoption of AI tech (eg CoPilot) within the engineering teams with the focus on enhancing productivity and time to market.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate closely with product engineering, infrastructure, security, and data teams to align technical architecture with business goals.

• Serve as a technical thought partner translating product goals into robust technical solutions.

• Participate in roadmap planning, capacity management, and cross-team architectural reviews.

• Present architecture roadmaps and trade-offs to executive leadership and technical teams

Technology Operations & Governance

• Support high-availability operations for products, shared services and platform capabilities.

• Own key architectural decisions related to performance, reliability, observability, cost, and maintainability.

Team Management & Enablement

• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of platform engineers and architects.

• Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous learning.

• Define team goals, OKRs, and performance metrics aligned with company objectives.

Required Experience:

• Proven software engineering experience and technical leadership or architecture roles.

• Deep experience designing scalable, distributed systems and cloud-native architectures (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Proven success leading platform or infrastructure teams supporting developer tools, shared services, or internal platforms.

• Strong understanding of AI driven and modern application development practices (CI/CD, containers, microservices, IaC, observability).

• Experience designing and scaling platforms that support AI use cases

• Deep understanding of AI platforms, model lifecycle management, and AI compliance practices.

• Prior experience modernizing monolithic or legacy applications

• Familiarity with compliance and security requirements in cloud environments (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, AML, KYC, etc).

• Hands-on experience with tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar.

• Experience leading engineering transformation or platform evolution at an enterprise level.