Job Purpose:

Responsible for designing and reviewing optimal solution approaches for Retail Banking Group initiatives, ensuring alignment between business requirements and the enterprise technology strategy. This role spans a broad set of responsibilities, including establishing guidance for solution development and review processes, crafting scalable and fit-for-purpose architectures, and overseeing the implementation of low-level designs.
Operating across both agile squads and waterfall-managed systems of record, the Solution Architect collaborates closely with cross-functional teams, including business, product, engineering, and technology, to deliver value-driven outcomes that support RBG’s strategic goals.
 

Key Result Areas
Key responsibilities include:
•    Driving the identification and design solutions to meet evolving business needs.
•    Ensuring RBG architectural governance and adherence to Enterprise Architecture standards throughout the solution and software lifecycle.
•    Reviewing and supporting engineering teams in building robust, scalable products and platforms.
•    Drive the adoption of APIs and microservices across retail banking systems, including External APIs for partner integrations & openbanking and internal APIs for modular service orchestration.
•    Promote reusability and extensibility across retail platforms to accelerate product delivery.
•    Recommend and oversee modernization initiatives to support evolving retail banking needs.
•    Guide development teams in adopting and implementing security architecture and standards specific to customer-facing applications.
•    Ensure non-functional requirements (e.g., performance, availability, scalability) are embedded in all solution designs.
•    Collaborate with agile delivery models, working closely with product, engineering, and operations teams to ensure timely and scalable solution delivery.
•    Maintain a retail-focused technology radar to track emerging trends and recommend innovations for continuous improvement. 
•    Provide input into enterprise architecture roadmaps from a retail perspective, ensuring scalability and adaptability.
 

Operating Environment, Framework and Boundaries, Working Relationships
•    Reporting to Expertise Lead- Architecture
•    Working with PO and TL to provide solution architecture for business use-cases aligned with Application owners 
•    Working with Engineering team to develop solutions as per defined standard and practices
•    Working with Infrastructure and Enterprise Architecture teams to ensure the solution fits into the broader IT landscape.

Problem Solving
•    Developing solution to solve business requirements 
•    Application build and deployment issues
•    End to end diagnosis of digital journeys to back end systems

Decision Making Authority & Responsibility
•    Driving optimal solution approach 
•    Recommending alternate and emerging tech stacks

Knowledge, Skills and Experience
•    Overall 15+ years of application development experience, including 5+ years in Solution Architecture
•    Having strong knowledge of banking technology with at least 5+ years of experience in solutioning banking applications
•    Ability to operate within retail digital squads and SOR systems, balancing agile and waterfall methodologies. Senior Stakeholder Management
•    Expertise in crafting Blueprint, High-level and Low-level designs 
•    Guide all the technology teams in stability of applications and platforms by providing critical inputs on various aspects like performance testing, performance tuning etc
•    Ability to challenge technology solutions provided by vendors and in-house teams to propose an optimal solution
•    Ability to identify the hotspots in the current application landscape and provide solutions to rectify
•    Experience defining functional and non-functional application requirements
•    Experience in architecting micro-services based applications. 
•    Experience working with online commerce and omni-channel retail business practice.
•    Expert knowledge of multi cloud stack 
•    Enterprise Architecture certification TOGAF is preferred
•    Strong knowledge on Domain Driven Design,  microservices, API and front-app development tools  such as Java, node.js, SpringBoot, API gateway, 
service mesh, react, ReactNative, .net core and emergent AI technology  
•    Excellent knowledge of SQL and NOSQL database technologies such as SQL, Oracle, MongoDB, etc.,
•    Expertise in OAuth2.0, FAPI2.0, TLS, mTLS, GDPR/PII compliance and related security Architecture standards
•    Experience working with an Agile DEVOPS development methodology using continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes