Job description

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Solutions Architect to design and govern the architecture of banking-grade fintech platforms — digital wallets, money market/deposit accounts, payments, and value-added services (VAS). Think systems comparable to Shoprite Money Market, retail banking wallets, or similar high-volume consumer financial platforms.

You will own end-to-end solution design, define integration and data architecture, and ensure every system we build satisfies financial regulation from day one. You will work closely with the Technical Lead and engineering teams who build to your designs.

Key Responsibilities

Solution Architecture

- Design end-to-end architectures for banking and payments products: wallets, money market/transactional accounts, remittances, bill payments, airtime/VAS.
- Define integration patterns with core banking systems, payment switches, card schemes, and third parties (ISO 8583 / ISO 20022, EFT, RTC, DebiCheck, Rapid Payments, card issuing/acquiring).
- Design ledger, reconciliation, settlement, and clearing flows with strong guarantees around transaction integrity and idempotency.
- Own non-functional architecture: high availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and performance at retail scale.
- Lead build-vs-buy assessments and vendor selection (core banking, KYC, fraud, ledger platforms).
- Produce and maintain architecture artefacts: solution designs, sequence and data-flow diagrams, API contracts, and threat models.
- Establish and chair architecture governance (design reviews, standards, reference architectures).

Compliance & Security by Design

- Architect systems compliant with South African financial regulation:
- SARB requirements and the National Payment System Act
- FICA — KYC/AML/CFT controls, customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, FIC reporting
- GDPR — data privacy, residency, consent, retention
- PASA / payments industry rules and clearing/settlement participation
- Design for PCI DSS compliance in card data environments.
- Embed security architecture: encryption, key management (HSMs), secure SDLC, fraud controls, and complete audit trails.
- Support audits, penetration tests, and regulator or sponsor-bank due diligence.

Stakeholder Engagement

- Partner with product, compliance, legal, and operations to balance speed-to-market with regulatory obligations.
- Engage sponsor banks, card schemes (Visa/Mastercard), and fintech partners on integration and certification.
- Present architecture decisions and trade-offs to executives and external stakeholders.

Minimum Requirements

- 8+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years in solution or enterprise architecture roles.
- Proven track record architecting banking or fintech systems in production — digital wallets, money market/deposit products, payment platforms, or mobile money.
- Deep understanding of double-entry ledgers, reconciliation, settlement, and clearing in the South African payments landscape.
- Strong working knowledge of FICA, GDPR, PCI DSS, SARB/NPS requirements and how they translate into system design.
- Expertise in distributed systems: microservices, event-driven architecture, messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ), API design, and financial-grade data modelling.
- Cloud architecture experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP) in regulated environments.

Advantageous

- Core banking platform experience or proprietary ledger design.
- Card scheme certification experience (Visa/Mastercard issuing or acquiring).
- TOGAF, AWS/Azure Solutions Architect, CISSP/CISM, or PCI ISA certification.
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

Personal Attributes

- Systems thinker who can zoom from regulatory obligation down to API contract.
- Clear communicator with executives, regulators, and engineers alike.
- Pragmatic — balances architectural purity with commercial delivery pressure.

In addition to your standard CV, please ensure your application specifically addresses the following:

Name the specific platform(s) you've worked on (e.g., Money Market, a mobile money platform, or equivalent) and describe your specific role and scope on each — not just "banking/fintech experience" as a listed skill.

1. Confirm direct sponsor-bank / BaaS interfacing experience — describe a specific instance where you sat in technical integration discussions with a sponsor or partner bank's engineering or compliance team, and what that involved.
2. Confirm payments and credit-regulation exposure — good to have exposure: PayShap, and NCR/NCA familiarity (in addition to FICA/POPIA/PCI DSS already listed), micro-lending etc.
3. Provide at least one reference who can speak directly to your fintech delivery work (not a generic HR/manager reference) — we will be verifying this as part of the process.

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