Director, Architecture Lead

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). This leader will define and drive high-performance, resilient, and compliant technology designs, collaborating across engineering, data, compliance, and business stakeholder groups to deliver secure, scalable, and standards-aligned solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture Leadership

• 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.
• Design, Documentation, and Communication
• 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.
• Payments and Financial Crime Expertise
• 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.

Data Architecture and Quality

• 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.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• 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.
• Technical Depth
• 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.
• Communication & Leadership
• 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.

Success Measures

• High-quality architectures that meet performance, resiliency, security, and compliance requirements and pass governance reviews.
• Clear, consistent documentation and diagrams enabling efficient delivery and audit readiness.
• Measurable improvements in system reliability, throughput/latency, data quality, and incident reduction.
• Strong cross-team collaboration and stakeholder satisfaction across Compliance, Engineering, and business functions.

BNY assesses market data to ensure a competitive compensation package for our employees. The expected base salary for this position when employment commences can be found in the Job Info section at the bottom of the posting.

Base salary offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Base salary is only part of the total rewards package, which may include eligibility for an annual discretionary incentive award. Subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans then in effect, eligible employees may enroll in a 401(k) plan as well as participate in Company-sponsored medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance plans for the employee and the employee's eligible dependents. Eligible employees also may receive other benefits (including various paid time off benefits, such as vacation and sick time), dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

If hired, the employee will be in an "at will" position and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payments or compensation programs) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.