Join us as the Head of Payments Technology Architecture

In this role you will be critical in leading the modernisation of payment technology platforms and working practices to support the bank’s ambitious digital transformation.

The role will work in close partnership with both technology and business peers across NatWest to develop and align the target business and technology architecture and roadmap.

For someone with a background in defining business and application architectures and roadmaps for complex enterprises, this is an excellent opportunity to join our business

You'll be leading and defining the intentional architecture for your assigned scope in order to ensure that the current architecture being delivered by engineers best supports the enterprise and its long term strategy

With valuable exposure, you’ll be building and leveraging relationships with colleagues across the bank to ensure commercially focused decisions and to create long term value for the bank

What you'll do

In this senior Technology Architecture leadership role, you will lead and manage Payments Technology Architecture, ensuring that the vision and architecture roadmaps align with and support the delivery of customer-focused propositions. You will drive architectural strategy in collaboration with business and technology leaders, engaging with all business areas and technology domains for integrated architecture roadmaps. You will play a strong role connecting across the Payments Industry and will provide a strong voice within the NatWest Group ensuring that we engage with appropriate governance forums including the Architecture Council.

We will look to you strongly influence the development of business strategies at an organisational level, identifying transformational opportunities for our businesses and technology areas associated with both new and existing technologies.

You will own the operating model and practices for the technical architecture discipline within Payments Technology, setting standards for excellence in both the creation of architecture and the development of your teams’ critical people capabilities

As a champion of a service mindset and a driven enterprise behaviour, you will promote continuous optimisation and simplification of the architecture, fostering modern, cloud-native architecture patterns and cross-functional partnerships, ensuring capabilities are shared and reused effectively

Payments data and Data Architecture and lineage is a key accountability while also supporting the domain in removing technical debt and enhancing operational resilience

You will be defining and communicating the current, resultant and target state architecture for your assigned scope. You’ll be making sure that the architecture links to, and is informed by, our overall strategy and architecture, and produces the architecture outcomes

Translating architecture roadmaps into packages of work that allow frequent incremental delivery of value to be included in the portfolio backlog

Defining, creating and maintaining architecture models, roadmaps, standards and outcomes, using architecture strategies to ensure alignment to adjacent and capability mode

Working closely with business owners, portfolio managers, product managers and release managers to define the target intentional architecture

Leading complex and technically challenging architectural transformations, coordinating design and platform teams across enterprise domains

Seeking out and utilising continuous feedback, fostering adaptive design and engineering practices to drive the collaboration of programmes and teams around a common technical vision

The skills you'll need

To succeed in this role, you’ll need expert knowledge of application architecture, and at least one business, data or infrastructure architecture with an in-depth knowledge of the remaining disciplines. A skilled negotiator to navigate the enterprise dependency while driving for continued simplification and reuse. You will have excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to colleagues, up to senior leadership level, along with a good understanding of Agile methodologies with experience of working in an Agile team.

You’ll also demonstrate:

Strong collaboration. senior leadership, resource and stakeholder management skills

Experience of developing, syndicating and communicating architectures, designs and proposals for action

An understanding of industry architecture frameworks, such as TOGAF and ArchiMate

Experience of working with business solution vendors, technology vendors and products within the market

A background in systems development change life cycles, best practices and approaches

Knowledge of hardware, software, application and systems engineering