Chief Architect / Principal Architect

About PayRiva: We are an AI-first fintech advisory and payments engineering firm focused on redesigning how modern finance is built, deployed, and scaled. We architect AI-powered financial ecosystems that support digital banking, intelligent payment orchestration, open banking, card issuing, cross-border payments, and smart digital wallets. Our services span AI-native payments, KYC/KYB/AML automation, general ledger systems, white-labeled fintech platforms, and technology advisory. We embed AI across the stack for fraud detection, compliance automation, payment optimization, and predictive analytics all aligned with global standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR, CCPA, and eIDAS. By combining deep fintech expertise with advanced AI, PayRiva helps organizations accelerate innovation, maintain regulatory compliance, and build scalable, intelligent financial products for global markets.

The Role: As a Chief Architect and Technology Principal, you will define and govern the enterprise architectural vision for PayRiva and its Clients, and serve as the final technical authority on solution design, technology selection, and engineering governance across the organization. You'll design, evolve, and oversee end-to-end cloud-native architectures, AI-driven systems, microservices, and API-driven financial platforms with a particular focus on fintech, payments, and AI-first solution engineering. This is a hands-on leadership role that pairs senior technology vision with deep architectural authority. You will work closely with product, engineering, data science, and compliance teams to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, and compliant architectures aligned with industry standards and regulations.

What you'll do:

• Define and own the enterprise technology strategy, architectural vision, and multi-year technology roadmap for the company and its client portfolio, with an AI-first, cloud-native, and API-driven orientation.
• Design and govern end-to-end, highly available, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable cloud-native architectures spanning microservices, event-driven systems, API platforms, and AI/ML inference pipelines.
• Lead complex, multi-stakeholder technical initiatives, translating business objectives and regulatory requirements into reference architectures, conceptual designs, and implementation blueprints.
• Partner with Product Management, Engineering leadership, and client executive stakeholders to convert functional and non-functional requirements into target-state architectures and execution plans aligned with payments and banking standards (PCI DSS, PSD2, ISO 20022, SOC 2, GDPR).
• Provide authoritative guidance on technology selection, integration patterns, data architecture, performance engineering, observability, resilience, security, identity, and total-cost-of-ownership optimization across hybrid and multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Architect API-driven Spring Boot, JavaEE, and FastAPI applications that are secure-by-design, performant, scalable, and operationally reliable including high-throughput payment processing and transaction-management subsystems.
• Establish and enforce architectural principles, design patterns, coding standards, technology governance frameworks, reference implementations, and engineering best practices.
• Architect AI-agentic systems and LLM-based solutions, including agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model selection, fine-tuning strategy, inference optimization, ML training pipelines, and responsible-AI guardrails for production.
• Review, evaluate, and formally approve critical solution components, system designs, and production-readiness artifacts; serve as the final technical authority on architecture sign-offs.
• Mentor and uplift engineering teams, architects, and technical leads on advanced architecture patterns, distributed-systems design, cloud-native engineering, and emerging AI/ML practices.
• Lead conceptual design, entity-relationship (ER) modeling, product ideation, and solution engineering workshops with executive stakeholders.
• Represent PayRiva as the senior technology authority in client architecture review boards, executive briefings, due-diligence engagements, and industry forums.

What you'll bring:

• A strong background in architecture and architectural design for large-scale, distributed, and secure financial or payments systems.
• Hands-on software development experience with modern languages, cloud-native platforms, and microservices-based design.
• Proven expertise in integration that includes API-first architectures, third-party fintech integrations, and enterprise system interoperability.
• Demonstrated leadership and program-management skills: driving cross-functional technical initiatives, owning technical roadmaps, and delivering complex platforms on time.
• Deep understanding of fintech domains such as payments, digital banking, open banking, card issuing, and KYC/KYB/AML processes.
• Familiarity with regulatory and security frameworks (e.g., PCI DSS, GDPR, CCPA, AMLD, PSD2, MiFID II, eIDAS) and best practices for secure system design.
• Proficiency with major cloud platforms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP).

Minimum Requirements:

A Bachelor's degree or higher (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related technical discipline, plus progressive post-baccalaureate experience in software architecture, cloud-native systems design, and enterprise-scale solution engineering. The specialized and complex nature of the role's duties requires the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge consistent with a specialty occupation.

Why PayRiva:

Join a team building the next generation of intelligent financial infrastructure. As Chief Architect, you'll set the technical direction for an AI-first fintech platform serving global markets, shape how cutting-edge AI meets regulated finance, and lead the engineers building it.

PayRiva Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.