Director of Consulting Expert - Technical Architect

Job Order: J - Permanent Full Time

Title: Director of Consulting Expert - Technical Architect

Category: Architecture

City: Columbus, Ohio, United States

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.

• Own and govern the end-to-end architecture for a modernized payments platform, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards and long-term business strategy.
• Define and apply enterprise architecture patterns, including layered architecture, event-driven architecture (EDA), domain-driven design (DDD), and hexagonal/onion architectures.
• Lead the design and governance of microservices-based architectures, including service decomposition, API gateways, service mesh patterns, scalability, and resiliency strategies.
• Establish and enforce integration patterns such as messaging, publish/subscribe, orchestration vs. choreography, and API-first design (REST, Graph
  
  QL, gRPC).

• 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.
• Architect and oversee real-time, high-volume transaction systems with strict requirements for low latency, high availability, and data integrity.
• Guide the implementation of payment orchestration, clearing and settlement processes, fraud mitigation, tokenization, and integration with core banking systems.
• Ensure architectural compliance with financial regulatory and industry standards, including KYC/AML, PCI-DSS, FFIEC, and related frameworks.

• Lead cloud-native architecture strategy, preferably leveraging AWS or GCP, including containers (Kubernetes), serverless components, and distributed systems.
• Define API lifecycle management practices covering design, versioning, governance, and security.
• Guide the use of event streaming and messaging platforms such as Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, MQ, or Rabbit
  
  MQ.
• Shape data architecture strategies encompassing operational data stores, real-time data pipelines, data lakes, and data lineage.

• Define and oversee security architecture, including identity and access management (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML), encryption, key management, and zero-trust principles.
• Ensure platforms are designed for resiliency and scale, including high availability, disaster recovery, failover, and multi-region deployments.
• Champion performance engineering and resiliency testing practices, including chaos engineering, to ensure operational excellence.

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, translating business objectives into actionable architectural and technical strategies.
• Lead and mentor senior architects and engineering teams across multiple work streams.
• Balance strategic vision with hands-on architectural guidance throughout the delivery lifecycle.

• 15+ years of progressive experience in technology, architecture, or engineering roles, with a strong focus on large-scale enterprise systems.
• 8+ years of experience in enterprise or solution architecture, including responsibility for end-to-end system design.
• 5+ years of experience in a consulting, advisory, or client-facing leadership role, preferably within financial services.
• Demonstrated experience leading multi-year, large-scale platform modernization programs.

• 8+ years of hands‑on experience designing and governing microservices-based architectures.
• 5+ years of experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous integration patterns.
• 5+ years of experience with API-first design and API lifecycle management (REST required; Graph
  
  QL and gRPC preferred).
• Strong expertise in enterprise architecture patterns, including layered, DDD, and hexagonal/onion architectures.

• 7+ years of experience working in banking or financial services technology.
• 5+ years of direct experience with payments systems and payment rails (ACH, Fedwire, RTP, SWIFT, card networks, etc.).
• Proven experience…