Who You Will Work With:The Solution Architect will report to the Leader, Payments Modernization. The Solution Architect ensures that business and product outcomes are enabled through cohesive, secure, resilient, and scalable technology solutions that align with Interac's enterprise architecture standards and modernization priorities.
The Solution Architect partners closely with Product, Engineering, Platform, Security, and Delivery teams to translate product strategy and delivery priorities into well designed solution architectures. Key accountabilities include solution designs across new initiatives and in flight change, reducing technical complexity and duplication, managing technical risk, and ensuring solutions are fit for purpose, operable, and compliant within a 24/7 payments environment. Solution Architects consumes enterprise standards/patterns and escalates deviations. Accountable for solution decisions within the domain.
What You Will Do: - Lead the design of end-to-end technology solutions, ensuring alignment to product requirements, enterprise architecture standards, and non-functional requirements including availability, performance, security, and resiliency.
- Produce and maintain solution architecture artefacts such as solution design documents, UML models, architecture diagrams, interface specifications, and implementation blueprints that provide clear guidance to delivery teams.
- Promote architectural consistency by applying established architecture principles, approved design patterns, and reusable solution components across products and platforms.
- Reduce complexity, manage dependencies, and identify opportunities to simplify legacy solutions, improve maintainability, and reduce technical debt while supporting business and product objectives.
- Partner with engineering, platform, data, cloud, and operations teams to guide architectural decisions throughout the SDLC. Identify and mitigate technical, security, performance, integration, and operational risks early in the delivery lifecycle.
- Support pragmatic decision-making by evaluating design alternatives and balancing business priorities, delivery timelines, quality, and long-term sustainability.
- Collaborate with Product, Technology, Security, and Operations stakeholders to translate business requirements into practical solution designs.
- Communicate technical concepts, trade-offs, assumptions, and recommendations in a clear and business-relevant manner, ensuring alignment between product goals, customer outcomes, and technology delivery.
- Ensure solutions comply with enterprise standards, architecture guardrails, security policies, regulatory requirements, and operational expectations.
- Contribute to architecture reviews, shared design patterns, reference architectures, templates, and documentation standards.
- Actively support continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, engineering excellence, and adoption of cloud-native and modern architecture practices.
What You Bring: - 7+ years of progressive technology experience, with 5 years in a Solution Architect, Technical Lead, Lead Developer, or equivalent role
- Demonstrated ability to operate within a federated architecture model by applying enterprise principles/standards/patterns in product delivery, identifying gaps, and escalating deviations and exceptions through established governance.
- Proven ability to translate business and product outcomes into end-to-end solution designs, including clear scope boundaries, assumptions, dependencies, and implementation guidance for engineering teams.
- T-shaped architecture capability spanning solution, application, integration, data, infrastructure, and security architecture, with depth in at least one domain relevant to the product area.
- Experience designing secure, resilient, scalable solutions across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments; strong understanding of modern integration patterns (e.g., APIs, event-driven, messaging, batch/stream processing where applicable).
- Strong non-functional requirements (NFR) engineering: availability, resiliency, performance, security, privacy, observability (logging/metrics/tracing), capacity, operability, and disaster recovery-appropriate for a 24/7 payments environment.
- Experience in financial services or another highly regulated environment, with working knowledge of security, risk, and compliance expectations (e.g., PCI DSS, ISO 27001/27002, SOC 2, or equivalent control frameworks).
- Ability to lead architecture exploration (spikes/prototypes/POCs) and guide solutions through production readiness (operating model, SRE/operations handoffs, runbooks, SLOs/SLIs, and support considerations).
- Strong decision-making and trade-off analysis (risk, cost, time-to-market, performance, resiliency), including the ability to document decisions and rationale (e.g., Architecture Decision Records) and manage exception requests.
- Experience collaborating with delivery teams using DevSecOps practices (CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, security scanning, quality gates) to embed architecture and controls into the SDLC.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills; able to explain complex technical concepts, present options and trade-offs, and drive alignment across Product, Engineering, Platform, Security, and Delivery stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to influence without direct authority, facilitate cross-team alignment, and mentor engineers/architects through communities of practice and peer review.
- Architecture and/or cloud/security certifications are an asset (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP architecture, Kubernetes, security certifications, and/or TOGAF where relevant).
- Eligibility to work for Interac Corp. in Canada in a full-time capacity.
What We're Offering: The hiring range for this position is $145,000 - $155,000, and you will also be eligible for our short-term incentive plan. The exact amount will depend on factors such as skills, experience, and job-related knowledge, but Interac's commitment goes beyond compensation. Our Total Rewards package is designed to support your well-being and future, and includes:
- Generous vacation and wellness days to help you recharge
- Comprehensive employer-paid benefits coverage for peace of mind
- Market-leading employer-funded RRSP program to invest in your future
- Flexible hybrid work model for better work-life balance
- Access to a free and confidential 24/7 employee & family assistance program to offer support for you and your immediate family
- Pregnancy and parental leave top-up to support growing families
- Charitable donation matching with United Way to amplify your impact
Additional Pre-Employment Requirements:To ensure the integrity of our organization, successful candidates will be required to complete background checks, which may include, Canadian Criminal Credit Check, Canadian ID Cross-Check, Public Safety Verification, 5-year Employment Verification, Education Verification, Credit Check, and Social Media Check.
