A US bank is seeking a hands-on Director, Solution Architect with strong domain expertise across Custody, Wealth, and Asset Management to define, shape, and deliver modern platform architecture aligned to business and technology strategy.
Location: Hybrid – Jersey City, NJ
This role requires deep architectural capability combined with practical engineering credibility. The successful candidate will be expected to work closely with product, engineering, operations, data, and business stakeholders to design scalable, resilient, secure, and high performing solutions across critical platforms. This is not a purely conceptual architecture role. The bank is looking for someone who remains technically hands on, can guide engineering teams through complex implementation decisions, and is comfortable engaging from strategy through execution.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture Leadership
Define and evolve platform architecture strategy for applications and services supporting Custody, Wealth, and Asset Management capabilities. Translate business priorities, operating model objectives, and regulatory requirements into scalable architecture roadmaps. Produce architecture blueprints, target state designs, integration patterns, and modernization strategies. Ensure alignment to enterprise architecture principles, security standards, resiliency expectations, and engineering best practices. Lead architecture reviews and provide technical governance across solution design, delivery, and platform evolution.
Domain and Business Alignment
Partner with business and product stakeholders to understand workflows, operating models, pain points, and transformation opportunities across custody operations and servicing, asset servicing, portfolio administration, wealth platforms and advisory capabilities, asset management data and investment workflows, and client reporting, accounting, reconciliation, and operational controls. Apply domain understanding to improve platform design, data flow, interoperability, and operational efficiency. Support simplification and modernization of legacy workflows and platforms in highly controlled financial environments.
Hands On Technical Delivery
Remain actively involved in engineering and solution delivery, including prototyping, design validation, code reviews, technical troubleshooting, and implementation guidance. Work with engineering teams on API design, system integration, event driven architecture, data patterns, cloud deployment models, and observability. Contribute to reference implementations, proof of concepts, and reusable architecture patterns. Help teams solve complex production, performance, scalability, and integration issues.
Cloud, Data, and AI Enablement
Design and support deployment of applications and platforms on Azure and/or AWS. Drive adoption of cloud native services, containerization, infrastructure automation, and resilient distributed architecture patterns. Partner with data teams to design robust data architecture, data pipelines, metadata strategies, and analytics ready platforms. Identify and shape use cases for AI / GenAI capabilities, including knowledge retrieval, intelligent workflow support, summarization, classification, and operational productivity improvements. Ensure AI enabled solutions are practical, governed, secure, and aligned to enterprise standards.
Engineering Excellence and Modernization
Champion engineering excellence including automation, CI/CD, testing, reliability, security by design, and performance optimization. Drive modernization of legacy applications into modular, API led, event enabled, and cloud compatible platforms. Promote best practices in software design, observability, resiliency, release management, and operational readiness. Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, security, and SRE teams to enable stable and scalable production ecosystems.
Collaboration and Influence
Work cross functionally with architects, engineers, platform leads, data teams, cyber/security teams, and business leaders. Communicate architecture decisions clearly to both technical and non technical audiences. Mentor engineers and junior architects, raising technical capability across teams. Influence strategic technology decisions through expertise, credibility, and delivery focus.
The ideal candidate should be able to connect business processes to technology architecture and understand the operational and control requirements typical of regulated financial services environments.
Required Technical Skills
Core Architecture and Engineering
Strong experience in platform architecture, solution architecture, and distributed systems design. Proven ability to design and deliver microservices and service oriented architectures, event driven systems, API first platforms, high availability and resilient systems, and scalable batch and real time processing solutions. Deep understanding of integration patterns, application decomposition, and modernization approaches. Strong software engineering background with ability to engage in hands on technical work.
Cloud
Hands on experience with Azure and/or AWS, including some combination of compute, storage, networking, and managed services; cloud native application design; Kubernetes / container platforms; infrastructure as code; deployment automation; security and identity integration; and cost, resilience, and operational design considerations in cloud environments.
Data
Strong understanding of data architecture and engineering patterns. Experience with data modeling, data integration and transformation pipelines, metadata and lineage concepts, data quality and governance considerations, and analytical and operational data use cases. Ability to architect platforms that support both transactional and analytical workloads.
AI / GenAI
Practical exposure to AI and GenAI, such as integrating AI/ML or GenAI capabilities into enterprise workflows, retrieval augmented generation or knowledge retrieval patterns, LLM enabled search, summarization, classification, or assistant use cases, responsible AI, model governance, and secure enterprise adoption considerations, and working with structured and unstructured data to support intelligent applications.
Required Experience
Significant experience in architecture and engineering roles within financial services or similarly complex regulated industries. Demonstrated experience delivering technology solutions in Custody, Wealth, and/or Asset Management. Track record of leading architecture for complex enterprise platforms and transformation initiatives. Experience balancing strategic design with practical implementation detail. Experience working in Agile / product centric delivery environments. Strong stakeholder engagement skills across business, operations, and technology teams.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline. Advanced degree preferred but not required. 12+ years of experience in technology and architecture roles required; experience in the securities or financial services industry is a plus.
Compensation: DOE