POSITION OVERVIEWThe Director of solution architecture provides strategic leadership to accelerate technology integration and platform modernization by enabling teams with clear guardrails, reusable patterns, and automated governance. Rather than acting solely as a centralized control point, this role operates as an enterprise-wide architecture 'force multiplier'-empowering product (domain) and platform teams to deliver safely at speed while converging on a cohesive target-state.
A critical focus is the integration of capabilities into the Bank's core and digital ecosystem, establishing repeatable integration playbooks, canonical interfaces, and transition states that reduce risk while increasing time-to-value and synergy. The Senior Director drives measurable outcomes-faster delivery cycles, reduced complexity, and improved resiliency.
CHALLENGES TO BE METLead a team of solutions and domain architect to:
- Build and maintain an enterprise capability model and value-stream maps to anchor integration decisions-mapping capabilities to applications, data domains, and owners; identifying overlaps/gaps; and using this model to prioritize platform convergence, sequencing, and investment decisions.
- Drive platform rationalization decisions, identifying redundant systems and recommending pathways to reduce complexity and operational cost.
- Establish architectural guardrails, standards, non-functional requirements (NFRs), and design principles that govern cross-functional decision-making.
- Operationalize "architecture as code" by embedding standards and NFRs into pipelines, reference implementations, reusable templates, and automated checks (e.g., security, resilience, data controls), enabling self-service delivery at scale with consistent outcomes.
- Deliver architecture artefacts and manage the architectural risk register to ensure stability, resilience, performance, and security requirements for projects are met.
- Collaborate with Lines of business, Data, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and PMO teams to align design choices.
- Oversees projects architecture deliverables to ensure alignment with required timelines and architectural trade-offs are presented to senior executives with clear business, cost, risk, and timeline implications.
- Ensure all architecture activities support synergy goals, operational readiness, and long-term scalability.
Driving Transformation and Integration- Lead enterprise-wide architecture integration for core banking, digital channels, marketing, financing, risk systems, and supporting platforms.
- Govern architecture for project delivery, system cutovers, cloud migrations, and infrastructure consolidation.
- Lead the evolution of the architecture practice through creation of artifacts, transition maps, and decision records that drive clarity across teams.
Team performance- Partner closely with senior leaders across Lines of business, Technology, Data, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, and PMO.
- Provide leadership to solution architects, technical leads, and integration consultants throughout programs, projects and initiatives
- Mentor and grow a high-performing architecture by coaching on pragmatic frameworks, "just-enough" governance, and modern tooling (reference architectures, templates, decision records), raising overall architecture maturity and delivery throughput.
- Lead the operating model for architecture across internal teams, integration partners, and vendors-driving decision velocity, dependency clarity, and shared delivery standards with focus on continuous evolution and improvement.
- Lead the development, reporting and continuous improvement of architecture KPI metrics.
- Responsible for team budget management.
- Act as single point of entry for audit relationship, third-party risk management (TPRM), project and ad-hoc initiatives,
- Responsible for solution architecture demand management and team capacity to align with required timelines.
- Responsible for consultants hiring.
REQUIRED QUAIFICATIONS- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Architecture, or a related discipline.
- 10+ years of banking experience and 5-10 years in enterprise architecture, gained within financial services or consulting environments.
- Demonstrated ability to prototype and operationalize architecture decisions-using spike solutions, reference implementations, and experimentation to quickly test assumptions, quantify trade-offs, and inform executive decisions in fast-moving integration programs.
- Expertise across architecture domains such as cloud, data analytics, APIs/integration, security, infrastructure, digital channels, and core banking platforms.
- Strong understanding of NFRs including reliability, performance, scalability, disaster recovery, and security.
- Ability to design and govern complex multi-platform ecosystems.
- Strong leadership presence with the ability to simplify complexity and influence senior decision-makers.
- Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and develop architects-building shared standards, improving architectural decision quality, and scaling consistent practices across a federated organization.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to facilitate cross-functional alignment.
- Bilingualism - communicate in both French and English.
- Strategic mindset paired with operational awareness.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS- Architecture certifications such as TOGAF, SAFe Architect, or cloud architecture certifications are an asset.
