Director, Architecture Lead
About the role
BNY is seeking a Director-level Architect to lead enterprise architecture for Compliance Engineering with deep technical expertise in banking payments (SWIFT, ACH, RTP) and strong knowledge of Financial Crime (with emphasis on Anti-Money Laundering, and Market Abuse).
Responsibilities
Define end-to-end target and transitional architectures for payments and compliance platforms, integrating SWIFT, ACH, RTP and related rails.
Establish and maintain reference architectures, design patterns, and guardrails that meet performance, resiliency (RTO/RPO), security, and compliance objectives.
Lead architecture reviews, threat modeling, and resiliency assessments; ensure adherence to standards and best practices.
Rapidly produce high-quality designs, diagrams, sequence and data flow models, and documentation that are clear, consistent, and actionable.
Communicate complex topics simply for compliance, business stakeholders, and regulators; engage in deep technical discussions with developers, data engineers, and SREs.
Translate regulatory requirements (e.g., AML/KYC, data retention, transaction monitoring) into technical designs and control implementation guidance.
Architect solutions for transaction monitoring, surveillance, and other core Compliance capabilities. Partner with Financial Crime teams to design detection, investigation, and reporting capabilities; align technology to typologies and risk indicators.
Ensure designs meet or exceed standards for security, privacy, auditability, traceability, and regulatory expectations.
Define critical data elements (CDEs), data models, lineage, mapping, and data quality rules for payments and compliance domains.
Drive metadata management, master/reference data strategies, and robust data controls across ingestion, processing, storage, and consumption.
Collaborate with data engineering for scalable pipelines, streaming, and batch processing; ensure data reliability, timeliness, and completeness.
Work across Compliance Engineering and partner platforms/practices to deliver integrated solutions; facilitate design decisions and trade-offs.
Mentor architects and engineers; cultivate a collaborative, high-performing culture aligned to BNY principles (Be Client Obsessed, Spark Progress, Own It, Stay Curious, Thrive Together).
Contribute to roadmap planning, capacity and cost optimization, and operational excellence.
Qualifications
10+ years in software/solution/data/enterprise architecture with prior hands-on engineering experience (e.g., application development, integration, data engineering).
Proven delivery of large-scale, mission-critical payment systems and/or financial crime platforms in regulated financial services environments.
Deep understanding of payment rails and formats (e.g., SWIFT MT/ISO 20022, NACHA/ACH, RTP), messaging, clearing/settlement flows, and exception handling.
Strong data architecture expertise: relational and distributed databases, schema design, CDE definition, data quality, lineage, mapping, and governance.
Integration patterns (APIs, event streaming, messaging), microservices, and distributed systems performance and resiliency engineering.
Security and compliance controls: encryption, key management, identity/authorization, logging/monitoring, auditability, and regulatory reporting.
Excellent written and verbal communication; adept at simplifying complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences and regulators.
Effective collaborator and influencer; able to lead design forums, resolve technical conflicts, and drive consensus across teams.
Preferred Qualifications
Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Certifications: Relevant cloud (e.g., Azure/AWS), data (e.g., data management/governance), security (e.g., CISSP), AML/Financial Crime (e.g., CAMS) are a plus.
Tooling Proficiency: Industry-standard diagramming and modeling tools (e.g., UML/BPMN), data modeling tools, and documentation frameworks; experience with CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code is beneficial.
Standards & Practices: Familiarity with ISO 20022, NACHA rules, SWIFT CSP, NIST/industry security standards, and operational risk/resiliency frameworks.