Head of Architecture

Crown Agents Bank is a vastly growing and regulated UK bank that connects emerging and frontier markets to the rest of the world, using FX and payments technology. We are transforming the way payments and FX move through emerging markets, reducing friction so that more money gets to those who need it. Emerging markets payments are usually challenging, expensive, unreliable and opaque. Our solutions help fix these pain points. Ultimately, we connect traditionally hard-to-reach regions to global financial infrastructure, giving access to the best prices and the fastest, most reliable settlement.

FX and cross-border payments are often complex and expensive, especially when operating in emerging markets. Crown Agents Bank (CAB) wraps its deep and trusted relationships and strength of network around innovative digital capabilities, and cross-border transaction banking solutions to enable fintech, corporates, governments, development organisations and banks to move money to, from, and across often hard-to-reach markets.

Overview

We are seeking a visionary Head of Architecture based in London to lead the Bank’s architectural strategy and play a pivotal role in our multi-year transformation toward an agentic, intelligence-driven Target Operating Model (TOM). You will own the end-to-end enterprise architecture, modernise our design principles, and guide a talented team of architects through this evolution.

The Team

You will lead a small team of enterprise and domain architects and report directly to the CTO, working within a collaborative Technology Leadership Team. Technology is foundational to our transformation, and architecture plays a central, integrative role in re-platforming the Bank for an intelligent future.

The Role

As Head of Architecture, you will:

• Define and own the current-state, transitional, and target-state architectures across business, data, applications, and technology domains.
• Design and implement the architecture needed to support an agentic, AI-enabled Target Operating Model, including autonomy layers, orchestration patterns, and human-in-the-loop principles.
• Update the architecture function with modern workflows, flexible governance, and streamlined guardrails for continuous delivery.
• Lead, mentor and develop a high-performing architecture team, fostering modern engineering practices and capability maturity.
• Shape strategic technology roadmaps, partnering with senior stakeholders to identify transformational opportunities across Payments, FX, Data, AI, and Platform domains.
• Lead complex, multi-disciplinary change across legacy and modern systems, driving architectural simplification and scalable patterns.
• Work closely with engineering and change teams to deliver measurable business outcomes, translating architectural intent into practical execution frameworks and incremental value.

Responsibilities

• Develop enterprise architecture models, reference architectures, and standards aligned to our agentic TOM.
• Translate roadmaps into modular work packages enabling iterative, continuous value delivery.
• Champion event-driven, microservices-based, cloud-native architectures and their associated patterns.
• Foster adaptive design, engineering excellence, and feedback-driven evolution across teams.
• Govern architectural decisions pragmatically-balancing innovation, technical debt, and regulatory expectations.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior executives on strategic technology decisions and business-architecture alignment.

Essential

• Proven experience leading architecture functions in high-change, transformation-heavy environments.
• Deep expertise in Payments, FX, or high-scale transaction-processing platforms.
• Hands-on experience architecting distributed, event-driven, microservices-oriented systems.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-influencing skills with senior leadership.
• Experience working across modern and legacy technologies, including pathways for modernisation.
• Comfortable in regulated environments with strong cross-functional engagement.
• Familiarity with architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, ArchiMate, or similar.

Highly Desirable

• Experience with AI, agentic architectures, intelligent orchestration, or autonomous workflows.
• Experience in cross-border FX and payments.
• Background in systems engineering, data architecture, or platform engineering.
• Technical degree required.

• Hybrid working (4 days on-site)
• Contributory personal pension plan: - Minimum: Employee 2% and Employer 7%. Employer matches contributions in 1% increments to a maximum of: Employee 5% and Employer 10%
• Life Assurance - 4 times annual salary
• Group Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance - this may include cover for partner and or children at company cost. Cover includes Optical, Dental and Audiology
• Discretionary Bonus
• Competitive Annual Leave
• 2 Volunteering Days
• Benefit Hub