Title: Enterprise Solution Architect
Day Rate: Up to £848.96 PAYE (includes Holiday pay)
Type: Contract: Asap - July/30/2026
Location: Remote (with some London visits - flexible)
Overview
Our client is seeking an experienced Enterprise Solution Architect with deep, hands-on expertise in payments transformation and migration. This role focuses on bridging legacy and target architectures, ensuring secure, compliant, and efficient data migration across complex payment environments. The ideal candidate will bring strong domain knowledge across UK and international payment schemes, alongside the ability to operate in high-risk, high-volume production systems.
Responsibilities
* Own and define data architecture across legacy mainframe and target platforms
* Design data mappings, extraction strategies, and migration controls for large-scale payment systems
* Lead architectural input across payments migration programmes within PMI initiatives
* Support integration and transformation across payment schemes, messaging layers, and processing systems
* Ensure safe data extraction and migration without disruption to live payment processing
* Identify, manage, and escalate risks within migration and production environments
* Collaborate with engineering teams, SMEs, and stakeholders to align delivery and architecture
* Document architecture decisions, assumptions, and risks clearly
* Drive reconciliation, validation, and integrity of migrated datasets
* Contribute to governance, regulatory compliance, and control frameworks
* Work within complex legacy environments, navigating non-standard system behaviours
* Support delivery of pragmatic, executable solutions under real-world constraints
Experience
* Extensive experience leading payments migration programmes within banking environments
* Strong expertise across UK payment schemes (BACS, Faster Payments) and international payments (SWIFT, SEPA)
* Proven experience in payments risk, controls, and regulatory frameworks (e.g. CASS, CISA-aligned environments)
* Hands-on architecture or design experience in core payments processing systems
* Deep understanding of end-to-end payment lifecycles and system interactions
* Experience working with mainframe-integrated architectures and messaging layers (e.g. MQ, MT/MX formats)
* Strong technical capability with IBM DB2 on mainframe (indexing, partitioning, optimisation)
* Experience delivering data migration in high-volume, mission-critical systems
* Expertise in data mapping, lineage, ETL processes, and reconciliation methodologies
* Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments and proactively manage issues
* Strong stakeholder communication and ability to articulate complex architectural concepts clearly