Payments Architect 

Niche Payments Consultancy | Hybrid / Flexible Location

Are you a seasoned technical payments specialist ready to shape the future of complex payment solutions? A leading boutique consultancy in the payments sector is seeking a Payments Architect to lead high-impact technical assignments for major merchants, retailers, PSPs and other payments organisations.

This is a senior client-facing role for someone who combines deep hands-on payments expertise with strong architectural vision and the ability to guide clients through major solution design and implementation challenges.

About the Role

As a Payments Architect, you will take a leading role in designing end-to-end payment solutions across eCommerce and face-to-face environments. You will work directly with clients to define requirements, evaluate technologies and vendors, and create robust solution architectures that deliver scalability, resilience, high availability and security.

You will also support the consultancy’s growth by contributing technical expertise during sales processes, proposals and bids.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design and delivery of technical consulting assignments across eCommerce and F2F payment solutions.

• Shape end-to-end payment architectures using off-the-shelf and bespoke components.

• Ensure solutions meet the highest standards for availability, resilience, latency, scalability, security and flexibility.

• Produce detailed documentation including architectural blueprints and implementation plans.

• Communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Client Engagement

• Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior stakeholders within merchants, PSPs, processors and retailers.

• Lead workshops, gather requirements and translate business needs into actionable technical designs.

• Guide clients through vendor selection, integration approaches and implementation roadmaps.

• Support client teams throughout procurement, solution build, testing and go-live.

Subject Matter Expertise

• Apply deep understanding of card payment processes: authentication, authorisation, clearing, settlement and reconciliation.

• Explain and assess commercial and operational models including PayFac and Marketplace.

• Provide authoritative guidance on:

  • PCI DSS

  • SCA/3DS (including TRA and other exemptions)

  • Tokenisation (MDES / VTS)

  • Account updater services (VAU / ABU)

• Advise on modern architectural and delivery practices:

  • Microservices & containers

  • APIs and integration patterns

  • Event-driven architectures and event streaming

  • Data lakes & data pipelines

  • CI/CD, feature flagging, A/B testing

What We’re Looking For

Essential

• 20+ years’ experience in the technical side of the payments industry.

• Proven experience designing and delivering major eCommerce and/or F2F payment solutions.

• Strong background working with merchants, PSPs, processors or retailers.

• Excellent architectural skills and deep understanding of modern integration technologies.

• Strong analytical, documentation and problem-solving abilities.

• Ability to present complex technical concepts clearly to senior stakeholders.

Desirable

• Consulting or advisory experience.

• Experience contributing technical content for proposals, bids and sales processes.

• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Understanding of fraud prevention, risk controls and transaction monitoring.

Personal Qualities

• Credible and confident technical expert with strong client-facing skills.

• Pragmatic and commercially aware, balancing ideal solutions with real-world constraints.

• Collaborative and supportive team player.

• Excellent communicator, able to simplify and explain complexity.

• Highly organised, proactive and comfortable leading multiple assignments.

Interested?

If you’re an experienced payments architect looking for a senior role with real influence, we’d love to hear from you.
Apply now and help shape the next generation of payment solutions.