Director of Consulting Expert - Technical Architect

** Director of Consulting Expert - Technical Architect*
* ** Category:
** Architecture

** Main location:
** United States, Ohio, Columbus

** Position :
** J

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* Employment Type:

** Full Time

** Position

Description:

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* This position requires someone to be in an office work setting in Columbus, OH.

We are seeking a Director of Consulting Expert - Technical Architect to lead a large, multi-year modernization of a mission critical payments platform for a super-regional bank. This role is ideal for a senior consulting leader and architect who thrives at the intersection of enterprise architecture, cloud-native engineering, and complex banking payments ecosystems. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the future-state architecture, guiding delivery teams, and partnering closely with executive stakeholders to ensure a resilient, secure, and scalable transformation of the bank's payments capabilities.

This is a high-impact leadership role where your architectural vision, technical depth, and banking domain expertise will directly influence how millions of transactions are processed reliably and in real time.

** Your future duties and responsibilities:*
* Architectural Leadership & Design

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Own and govern the end-to-end architecture for a modernized payments platform, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards and long-term business strategy.

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Define and apply enterprise architecture patterns, including layered architecture, event-driven architecture (EDA), domain-driven design (DDD), and hexagonal/onion architectures.

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Lead the design and governance of microservices-based architectures, including service decomposition, API gateways, service mesh patterns, scalability, and resiliency strategies.

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Establish and enforce integration patterns such as messaging, publish/subscribe, orchestration vs. choreography, and API-first design (REST, Graph

QL, gRPC).

Payments & Banking Domain Leadership

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Serve as a subject matter expert on banking and payments technologies, including ACH, Fedwire, CHIPS, RTP, Zelle, SWIFT, card networks, and messaging standards such as ISO 8583 and ISO 20022.

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Architect and oversee real-time, high-volume transaction systems with strict requirements for low latency, high availability, and data integrity.

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Guide the implementation of payment orchestration, clearing and settlement processes, fraud mitigation, tokenization, and integration with core banking systems.

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Ensure architectural compliance with financial regulatory and industry standards, including KYC/AML, PCI-DSS, FFIEC, and related frameworks.

Cloud, Data, and Platform Strategy

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Lead cloud-native architecture strategy, preferably leveraging AWS or GCP, including containers (Kubernetes), serverless components, and distributed systems.

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Define API lifecycle management practices covering design, versioning, governance, and security.

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Guide the use of event streaming and messaging platforms such as Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, MQ, or Rabbit

MQ.

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Shape data architecture strategies encompassing operational data stores, real-time data pipelines, data lakes, and data lineage.

Security, Resiliency & Performance

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Define and oversee security architecture, including identity and access management (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML), encryption, key management, and zero-trust principles.

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Ensure platforms are designed for resiliency and scale, including high availability, disaster recovery, failover, and multi-region deployments.

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Champion performance engineering and resiliency testing practices, including chaos engineering, to ensure operational excellence.

Consulting & Stakeholder Leadership

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Act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, translating business objectives into actionable architectural and technical strategies.

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Lead and mentor senior architects and engineering teams across multiple work streams.

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Balance strategic vision with hands-on architectural guidance throughout the delivery lifecycle.

** Required qualifications to be successful in this role:*
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15+ years of progressive experience in technology, architecture, or engineering roles, with a strong focus on large-scale enterprise systems.

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8+ years of experience in enterprise or solution architecture, including responsibility for end-to-end system design.

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5+ years of experience in a consulting, advisory, or client-facing leadership role, preferably within financial services.

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Demonstrated experience leading multi-year, large-scale platform modernization programs.

Architecture & Technical Expertise

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8+ years of hands-on experience designing and governing microservices-based architectures.

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5+ years of experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous integration patterns.

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5+ years of experience with API-first design and API lifecycle management (REST required; Graph

QL and gRPC preferred).

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Strong expertise in enterprise architecture patterns, including layered, DDD, and hexagonal/onion architectures.

Payments & Banking Technology

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7+ years of experience working in banking or financial services technology.

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5+ years of direct…