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.
