Architect

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

Architects within the Expert Services team at Thought Machine play a crucial role in enabling clients to successfully modernise their core banking and payments systems using the Vault platform. This involves working across pre-sales and delivery engagements to provide expert advice on deployment, configuration, integration, and migration. The Architect will consult on the successful execution of end-to-end core replacement programmes. They are expected to have deep knowledge of the Vault product suite and future roadmap, both in terms of functionality offered, the non-functional requirements it has been designed to meet and the choices and constraints that have informed that architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Present Vault architecture and best practices to senior client stakeholders during pre-sales engagements and delivery.

• Interact with senior stakeholders across client organisations in both delivery and pre-sales, leveraging a broad consulting skillset.

• Work with banks to define target architectures and transition states for Vault implementations and migrations, ensuring the application of best practice.

• Design end-to-end solutions for core banking replacement initiatives, with the Vault product suite as the central component.

• Create and utilize AI agents to accelerate the delivery of architectural deliverables, and enable clients to take advantage of the same assets.

• Maintain an advanced level of understanding of the Vault platform and its future direction, providing a thorough overview to clients.

• Act as a self-sufficient consultant, often engaging with clients individually without continuous team support.

• Deliver training to client teams on Vault functionality and architecture.

• Create and maintain client-facing collateral on architectural topics.

• Interface with the Thought Machine product function to feedback necessary product features that allow clients to realise value, influencing the product roadmap.

Requirements

Essential

• Experience designing enterprise architectures for large financial service institutions.

• Domain knowledge in banking, ideally core banking or payments, with an understanding of the business drivers and regulatory context influencing large-scale transformation programmes.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Strong technical background, with good practical knowledge of established architectural patterns such as event-based architecture, CQRS, and process orchestration.

• Expert knowledge of cloud technologies and architectures, including emerging approaches for achieving high availability and disaster recovery (e.g., running systems across multi-availability zones and regions).

• Strong client-facing skills with the ability to communicate and defend a technical position to a mixed and potentially senior audience (enterprise architects, engineers, and business stakeholders).

• Good understanding of the business context, regulatory environment, and motivations for banking transformations, informing advice with banking domain knowledge and understanding of transformation execution.

Desirable

• Experience creating AI agents to accelerate delivery and improve efficiency.

• Some experience of large-scale migration programmes, particularly core banking migrations.

• Spanish language skills.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary

• Healthcare, vision and dental

• 25 days holiday

• Unlimited paid safe and sick time

• 401K matching (up to 7%)

• $750 per year flexible spend benefit

• Share options

• Commuter Pass

• Flexible Spending Account (FSA)

• Life and long-term disability insurance

• All the latest tech you need

• A talented and experienced team as your colleagues

• An environment where we encourage learning and progress

We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.