Lead Principal Solution Architect - EMEA

As a Lead Principal Solution Architect - EMEA, you set the technical direction on our most strategic banking engagements and make sure ambitious solutions actually ship. You are equally at home in deep architecture reviews with a client’s Chief Architect and in executive conversations with the CTO or COO. With years of designing large web-scale platforms behind you, you hold the full picture of a multi-year transformation without losing the detail. To our implementation teams, you are the trusted escalation point. To customers and partners, you are the senior voice they want in the room when the stakes are highest.

What you'll do

• Take lead architect responsibility on the largest and most complex programs in the region.
• Translate business ambition into an architecture that holds up under scrutiny across integration, security, performance, scalability, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
• Shape the target state, the transition path, and the trade-offs the customer needs to understand before they commit.
• Work across the full deal and delivery cycle.
• In pre-sales, partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering to win strategic opportunities, owning the architecture story from discovery through contract.
• In delivery, stay engaged at the moments that matter: inception, major design decisions, and the hard problems that surface mid-program.
• Raise the bar for the architects around you through design reviews, reference architectures, and worked examples, without directly managing a team of architects.
• Contribute to how Backbase sells and delivers at scale.
• Produce reference designs, patterns, and points of view that other architects reuse, feed field learnings back to Product and Engineering, and represent Backbase architecture in senior customer forums, analyst briefings, and partner conversations.
• Travel significantly, especially during inception and at key program milestones.

Who you are

• You have a decade or more of hands-on experience designing large Java platforms in production.
• Spring, Maven, and a modern CI/CD toolchain are second nature to you.
• You have strong, experience-backed opinions on Service Oriented and Micro-Services Architectures and when each is the right call.
• You understand modern front-end delivery, including JavaScript frameworks, MVC patterns, and REST API design with RAML and/or OpenAPI.
• When asked about architectural frameworks, you reach for them instinctively rather than looking them up.
• You have worked deeply with Enterprise Integration Patterns and integration frameworks.
• You have operational depth across application servers, databases, load balancers, and the rest of the stack that keeps a high-availability deployment healthy.
• You have excellent written and spoken English and can hold a room from senior engineer to C-level.

We will be extra happy if you:

• Have delivered solutions for large financial services organisations, especially retail or commercial banking.
• Have shipped at scale on public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) with containers and Kubernetes in production.
• Are fluent in patterns like CQRS, event sourcing, and event-driven integration.
• Have hands-on experience with API gateways, integration platforms, and identity systems in a banking context.
• Have spoken at industry events or published on banking architecture topics.

Join our team at Backbase, where you will work with some of the sharpest people in digital banking on programs that matter to the banks behind them and the millions of customers they serve. If you want senior technical ownership without stepping off the tools, this is the role.