Solution Architect - Microservice, Data and AI

Introduction A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You’ll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you’ll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You’ll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

Your Role And Responsibilities We are seeking an experienced Solution Architect to lead the design and delivery of scalable, secure, and compliant technology solutions for the banking industry. This role bridges business strategy and technology execution, ensuring architecture aligns with banking products, regulatory requirements, digital transformation goals, and enterprise standards. The ideal candidate has strong expertise in core banking, payments, lending, channels, integration, cloud, security, and solution governance.

Key Roles And Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end solution architecture for banking platforms, applications, and digital initiatives.
• Translate business, functional, and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Lead architecture design for core banking, payments, lending, customer onboarding, and digital channels.
• Ensure solutions comply with banking regulations, security standards, data privacy, and risk policies.
• Drive integration architecture across legacy systems, third-party platforms, APIs, middleware, and cloud services.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, product owners, delivery teams, vendors, and enterprise architects.
• Evaluate technology options and recommend architecture patterns, tools, and frameworks.
• Govern solution design through architecture reviews, standards, and approval processes.
• Support modernization and transformation initiatives, including cloud adoption and application re-platforming.
• Ensure high availability, resilience, performance, and disaster recovery in solution designs.
• Provide technical leadership during project delivery, implementation, and production rollout.
• Identify architecture risks, dependencies, and constraints, and define mitigation strategies.
• Create and maintain architecture artifacts, diagrams, design documents, and roadmaps.
• Mentor development and engineering teams on architecture best practices and design principles.
• Support audit, compliance, and operational readiness activities across banking technology solutions.

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 5+ years IT architecture or enterprise engineering experience
• Basic banking domain knowledge (retail banking, payments, lending processes)
• Understanding of banking regulations and compliance basics (PCI-DSS, SOX, GDPR)
• Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks (TOGAF fundamentals)
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Support for medium-scale cloud projects and modernization initiatives
• Introduction to risk, audit, and governance frameworks.

Technical Expertise

• Hybrid Cloud: AWS or Azure fundamentals; exposure to multi-cloud concepts; basic cloud architecture patterns
• Core Banking & Integration: Basic knowledge of core banking systems; REST APIs; introduction to middleware (MuleSoft, Kafka)
• Microservices & Cloud-Native: Docker basics; Kubernetes fundamentals; CI/CD pipeline exposure; familiarity with DevOps practices
• Security & Compliance: Basic IAM concepts; understanding of encryption; familiarity with security standards (NIST, CIS)
• Data & Analytics: Basic data platform concepts; exposure to cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery)
• Resilience & Performance: Understanding of HA/DR concepts; basic monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana)
• Architecture Governance: Design documentation; basic architecture modeling; support with solution blueprints

Preferred Certifications Preferred technical and professional experience

• AWS Solutions Architect Associate
• Azure Administrator or Azure Fundamentals
• Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer
• TOGAF 9 Fundamentals
• Kubernetes for Developers (CKAD)
• Security+ (CompTIA)

Desirable Skills

• Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking
• Eagerness to learn and grow in cloud architecture
• Experience with agile methodologies
• Mentorship receptiveness from senior architects