Group Enterprise Architect

Our client is a financial institution licensed to provide a comprehensive range of banking products and services. Built on a foundation of resilience and innovation, it has grown into a trusted provider of financial solutions for individuals, businesses, and institutions. The organisation is deeply committed to financial inclusion, social responsibility, and aligning with global best practices in financial services and technology.

The Group Enterprise Architect is responsible for defining, governing, and evolving the enterprise architecture strategy across the Group and the ADGM regulated bank entity. The role ensures technology platforms, data architecture, integration patterns, and security-by-design principles are aligned with business strategy, operational resilience requirements, and regulatory expectations (including FSRA requirements applicable to Category 1 Banks).

This role will lead the development and enforcement of architecture standards, reference architectures, and target-state roadmaps across critical domains including core banking, payments, digital channels, data platforms, identity/access management, infrastructure, cloud, and third-party services. The role will act as the central design authority ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, cost-effective, resilient, and deliverable.

• Develop and maintain the Group-wide enterprise architecture framework, including principles, standards, patterns, and technology direction.
• Define and maintain target-state architecture blueprints aligned to Group strategy and regulated entity requirements.
• Establish architecture governance processes (e.g., Architecture Review Board/Design Authority, architecture assurance checkpoints).
• Ensure alignment of technology solutions to business capabilities, risk appetite, and service resilience objectives.

• Act as the primary architecture authority supporting the ADGM bank entity’s technology design, change initiatives, and control environment.
• Ensure architecture decisions support regulatory expectations in relation to technology governance, operational resilience, outsourcing, and critical systems.
• Support internal and external audits and regulatory engagements by providing architecture documentation, traceability, and control evidence.

• Provide architectural oversight and design direction for major initiatives and critical systems, including as applicable:
• Core banking platform and surrounding services
• Payments architecture and integration with schemes/service providers
• Digital channels (web/mobile), onboarding and identity verification
• Data platforms (warehouse/lakehouse), analytics and reporting architecture
• Treasury, finance, risk and compliance platforms
• Ensure architecture supports scalability, performance, maintainability, and regulatory-grade availability.
• Define Group integration architecture standards including API strategy, messaging/event patterns, and system interoperability.
• Govern integration approaches across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
• Ensure reuse of shared services and avoidance of unnecessary technology duplication across Group entities.
• Promote strong documentation practices (logical/physical models, sequence diagrams, interface catalogues).

• Define and govern cloud/hybrid architecture principles including landing zones, connectivity, segmentation, and observability.
• Ensure architectures meet resilience requirements including disaster recovery design, failover, backup strategies, and capacity planning.
• Work with infrastructure and security teams to ensure non-functional requirements (availability, latency, RTO/RPO, patching) are embedded into designs.
• Ensure systems are instrumented for monitoring, incident response, and production support.

• IAM, PAM, and privileged access models
• Encryption at rest/in transit, key management and secrets management
• Network segmentation and secure…