Principal Banking Technology & Solution Architect; Canada

Location: Canada — Remote, with occasional client travel
Engagement: Independent Contractor / Consulting
Seniority: Principal / Senior Technology Advisory
Industry: Canadian Credit Unions, Banking Technology and Financial Services

Aequilibrium is a Canadian digital transformation and technology consulting company helping financial institutions modernize their technology platforms, improve member experiences, and deliver complex transformation programs. We combine business and technology strategy, solution architecture, experience design, software engineering, quality assurance, and AI-enabled innovation.

We are seeking an experienced, client-facing Principal Banking Technology & Solution Architect to advise Canadian credit unions on critical platform decisions, architecture modernization and complex technology migrations.

You will work directly with credit union CTOs, CIOs and transformation leaders as a trusted technical advisor.

Our clients are navigating significant changes across digital banking, core banking integrations, enterprise data and analytics, payments, CRM and cloud platforms. Several are migrating away from Central 1 Forge while simultaneously modernizing other components of their technology landscape.

Your role is to help these institutions make informed technology decisions, manage architectural complexity and reduce delivery risk. This is a hands-on advisory role requiring strong architecture judgment, banking domain knowledge, vendor evaluation experience and the ability to translate technical complexity into practical executive recommendations.

• Lead structured evaluations of enterprise technology platforms, including data analytics, digital banking, CRM, payments and integration solutions.

• Define business and technical evaluation criteria, requirements, architecture principles and vendor scorecards.

• Assess products such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Fiserv and Finastra analytics solutions, as well as relevant digital banking platforms.

• Facilitate vendor demonstrations, technical due diligence, reference checks and proof-of-concept evaluations.

• Assess functional fit, interoperability, security, scalability, operational complexity, licensing and total cost of ownership.

• Prepare decision papers, target architectures and recommendations for CTOs and executive steering committees.

• Assess current-state enterprise architectures and design pragmatic future-state architectures.

• Evaluate integration dependencies across core banking, digital banking, CRM, payments, data warehouses, fraud systems and third-party services.

• Define integration patterns, API strategies, data flows, architectural boundaries and transition roadmaps.

• Review vendor solution designs, identify architectural gaps and challenge unsupported technical assumptions.

• Provide architecture oversight across multiple vendors and implementation partners.

• Advise credit unions transitioning from Central 1 Forge to modern digital banking platforms.

• Evaluate replacement capabilities, functional parity, integration requirements and migration dependencies.

• Assess the implications of different platform versions, vendor configurations and customization approaches.

• Support migration planning, technical readiness assessments and architectural risk management.

• Work with delivery and QA leaders to define technical acceptance criteria and evidence-based go-live readiness.

• Lead assessments of legacy banking analytics and reporting environments.

• Evaluate…