Chief Architect

STRATOS SEARCH

Chief Architect

About the Company

A complex, high-growth fintech operating across multiple payment processing systems, a legacy eCom gateway, P2P/APM circuits, wallet, billing, merchant portal, 1C/reconciliation, BI/data, anti-fraud, and acquired autonomous teams.

The company is building a new technology governance model — CTO owns the entire technology system, CIO owns infrastructure and resilience, and the Chief Architect owns architectural depth, platform standards, and technical coherence across the entire system.

This is a senior hire that sits at the architectural centre of a real, complex, live payments ecosystem — not a greenfield project.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Chief Architect to bring order to our current collection of processing systems, platforms, legacy infrastructure, acquired teams, and regulated circuits — and to build a clear, scalable, and manageable target architecture for the company.

This role is not about drawing diagrams. It is about turning a complex, living ecosystem into a manageable technology platform. The Chief Architect is the architectural depth and technical brain of the CTO — responsible for making sure the entire system holds together as the company scales, acquires, and ships.

Key Responsibilities

Target Architecture

• Own the target architecture across all systems: processing, gateways, wallet, billing, merchant portal, accounting, reconciliation, BI/data, anti-fraud, regulated circuits, and acquired assets
• Produce a working architecture map that CTO, CIO, Product, and domain teams use to make real decisions — not an abstract presentation
• Answer the hard questions: where is the ledger, where is reconciliation, where is routing, what do we centralize vs. leave in domain processings

Platform Layer

• Define which functions become platform services and which remain within individual domain systems
• Own decisions on: unified API / gateway layer, routing, orchestration, settlement logic, ledger, reconciliation, event bus, identity / access, configuration & audit trail

Legacy eCom Gateway

• Design and drive the architectural strategy for decomposing the legacy eCom monolith
• Identify extraction priorities, apply strangler / wrapper / service layer patterns where appropriate
• Preserve team knowledge and ensure production continuity throughout

Acquired Team Integration

• Define an architectural integration standard for M&A: due diligence, dependency mapping, technical debt assessment, bus factor evaluation, security review
• Determine integration vs. conscious autonomy on a case-by-case basis — all acquired teams must be architecturally understood and manageable

Architectural Standards

• Establish and enforce standards across the organisation: API contracts, event contracts, data ownership, logging & monitoring, idempotency, transaction consistency, auditability, security by design, versioning, and deprecation policy

Architectural Review

• Build a lightweight, fast review process for cross-system decisions
• Must answer quickly: acceptable or not, risks, alternatives, acceptable temporarily vs. never — without becoming bureaucracy

Data / Ledger / Reconciliation

• Clarify where each financial data entity lives: transaction, financial obligation, balance, accounting record, reconciliation, merchant reporting, and regulatory reporting
• Define where duplication is acceptable and where a single source of truth is required

Resilience & Security

• Account for fault tolerance, SPOF elimination, disaster recovery, blast radius containment, circuit isolation, DDoS architectural impact
• Design for on-prem / hostile environment realities: VPN/RKN traffic, local data residency, risk of server seizure or regulatory pressure

Requirements

Domain Experience

• PSP / payment gateway, processing & acquiring, issuing & wallets, APM / P2P
• Core banking, payment orchestration, money movement, ledger / reconciliation
• Regulated fintech environments with multi-jurisdiction compliance requirements

Scale & Seniority

• Architecture spanning multiple systems, teams, domains, and countries simultaneously
• Platform or enterprise-level scope — not a single-product solution architect
• Legacy modernisation experience: monolith decomposition, strangler patterns, live migration

Technical Knowledge

• Distributed systems, event-driven architecture, message brokers (Kafka / RabbitMQ), API gateways
• Microservices, data architecture, financial data flows, transaction consistency, idempotency models
• High availability, observability, security architecture, cloud / on-prem / hybrid environments

Leadership & Mindset

• Firm on substance: can say 'this is not acceptable' and hold that position under pressure
• Pragmatic: distinguishes acceptable tech debt from architectural crime; does not stop the business
• Collaborative: works with strong CTO, CIO, and tech leads without becoming political
• Calm and grounded in chaos, legacy, and fast-moving environments

Nice to Have

• Experience from Priority 1 sources: Adyen, Checkout.com, Stripe, Worldpay, Paysafe, Nuvei, Rapyd, Ecommpay, Unlimit, Solidgate, Corefy
• Experience from Priority 2: Compass Plus, OpenWay, BPC, ACI Worldwide, FIS, Fiserv, Worldline, Finastra, Temenos
• CIS / Russian-speaking fintech background: Tinkoff, SberTech, Yandex Fintech, Kaspi, Freedom Pay
• Russian-speaking — preferred but not required; operating mindset matters more than language

Not a Fit

• Enterprise architect from a bank who draws TOGAF diagrams without building live systems
• Project-level solution architect experienced with only a single product or integration
• Cloud-native only — we operate on-prem with sovereignty and hostile environment constraints
• Academic who cannot ship under business pressure
• Strong communicator at executive level but unable to explain ledger, idempotency, or event flows

Compensation & Conditions

• Above-market compensation available for exceptional PSP / processing / ledger / high-load background
• Relocation support to Cyprus
• 6-month probation with structured KPIs and defined success criteria

This is not a CTO role. Compensation reflects a senior architectural position reporting to the CTO.

Apply

If this describes your background, we would like to hear from you.

Apply: https://searchstratos.eu/candidate-application

All open roles: https://searchstratos.eu/jobs

STRATOS Search · searchstratos.eu