Solutions Architect (payments) outside IR35

Summary: The role of Payments Solution Architect involves designing and governing the end-to-end payment processing architecture for a financial services business. This includes ensuring regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and seamless integration with various clearing and settlement infrastructures. The architect will be responsible for the complete payment instruction lifecycle, from generation to reconciliation, while also establishing frameworks for risk, compliance, and governance. The position requires strong technical skills in Java, Kotlin, and payment processing platforms, along with experience in regulated payments environments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design the complete payment instruction lifecycle, including payment generation, validation, routing, confirmation, and reconciliation.
• Ensure high availability and operational resilience.
• Define scalable payment processing services and workflows.
• Architect month-end and quarter-end waterfall processing.
• Support syndicated lending and structured finance payment distribution models.
• Ensure accurate allocation and settlement calculations.
• Design mechanisms for exception handling and recovery.
• Define service-oriented and event-driven architectures using Java, Kotlin, and Spring Boot.
• Establish microservice patterns for payment orchestration.
• Ensure atomic transaction processing, idempotent execution, consistency guarantees, and fault tolerance.
• Design integrations supporting SWIFT MT messaging, ISO 20022 MX standards, MQ messaging, and XML-based interfaces.
• Architect payment hub integrations using Bottomline or comparable enterprise payment hubs.
• Define canonical message models and transformation frameworks.
• Design connectivity to settlement and clearing systems including Euroclear, Clearstream, DTC, and Austraclear.
• Create adapter-based integration architecture for clearing platforms.
• Establish reconciliation frameworks between internal systems and clearing networks.
• Design full audit trails for every payment instruction and operational monitoring.
• Ensure complete traceability from initiation through settlement.
• Ensure architecture satisfies regulated payments and settlement requirements.
• Support operational controls and regulatory audit requirements.
• Design security, non-repudiation, and evidential record-keeping mechanisms.

Key Skills:

• Technical Skills: Java and/or Kotlin, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kafka, event-driven architecture, distributed transaction design, MQ technologies, XML processing, SWIFT MT messaging, ISO 20022 messaging.
• Payments & Settlement Experience: Strong experience in payment processing platforms, settlement systems, clearing networks, and reconciliation frameworks.
• Audit and compliance controls.
• Domain Experience: Preferred experience in regulated payments environments, securities settlement, capital markets operations, and syndicated lending waterfall processing.
• Desirable: Bottomline payment hub experience and direct experience integrating with Euroclear, Clearstream, DTC, or Austraclear.

Salary (Rate): undetermined

City: London Area

Country: United Kingdom

Working Arrangements: undetermined

IR35 Status: outside IR35

Seniority Level: undetermined

Industry: Other