Solutions Architect

Zilch is a payment tech company on a mission to create the most empowering way to pay for anything, anywhere. Combining the best of debit, credit and savings, we give our customers the option to earn instant cashback or spread the cost of pricier purchases, completely interest free and with no late fees. Pretty great, right?

We started in 2018 with a small team and a big dream – to make credit accessible to all. Since then, we’ve achieved double unicorn status and taken on more than 5 million customers. There are some exciting projects coming up and we’ve got big growth plans.

Want to join us?

We’re looking for a Solution Architect to shape and govern the design of Zilch’s Spend Domain – covering Issuer, Acquirer, Spend Platform, Payments and Purchase.

You’ll sit at the intersection of engineering, product and the wider business – translating business needs into clear technical designs, guiding teams through architectural decisions, and keeping our Spend systems robust, auditable and aligned with Zilch’s engineering principles (Delivery First, Unblock Others First, Readable & Observable Code, Design for the Future).

Spend sits at the heart of Zilch’s money movement – issuing, acquiring, authorisation, settlement, scheme integrations and the purchase journey. Fintech or payments experience is a significant advantage.

• Own end-to-end architecture across the Spend Domain and keep designs coherent across squads.
• Design scalable, secure, cost-effective solutions that meet regulatory obligations (FCA, scheme rules, PCI DSS).
• Produce and maintain clear, auditable artefacts — diagrams, ADRs and solution designs
• Define and govern architectural standards, patterns and best practices within Spend, aligned to Zilch-wide standards.
• Lead design reviews and post-incident architecture reviews; balance latency, resilience, maintainability and cost.
• Guide the design of APIs, scheme/processor integrations, data flows and event pipelines; champion API-first design and governance.
• Define reusable patterns (service templates, integration patterns, data contracts, eventing models) that Spend squads adopt.
• Evaluate, compare and recommend third-party vendors and platforms across the payments ecosystem (processors, acquirers, gateways, BIN sponsors, tokenisation and card issuing providers) — running structured assessments across capability, commercials, compliance, operational fit and integration risk.
• Own vendor architecture decisions end-to-end: build-vs-buy analysis, RFP/PoC input, integration design, and ongoing review of vendor performance and lock-in risk.
• Remove architectural bottlenecks across multi-sprint, multi-squad efforts.
• Partner with product, operations, compliance, risk, finance and fraud to turn problems into technology outcomes.
• Assess emerging tech (Open Banking, AI, cloud-native, new scheme capabilities) and prototype where useful.
• Coach engineers across Spend in architectural thinking and trade-off analysis.

• Significant experience in software engineering, solution or technical architecture, with production systems shipped at meaningful scale.
• Demonstrable ownership of architecture for a non-trivial system or domain in production.
• Strong experience designing cloud-based systems (AWS, Azure or GCP), REST APIs, API gateways and service-based architecture.
• Distributed systems, microservices and event-driven architectures.
• Solid grasp of integration patterns, middleware, data stores and messaging platforms.
• Deep understanding of scalability, resilience, security, observability and cost optimisation as connected concerns.
• Track record of evaluating and integrating third-party vendors — structured comparisons, clear recommendations, and pragmatic integration designs that avoid unnecessary lock-in.
• Track record of leading design reviews and post-mortems across squads, and defining patterns that others reuse.
• Strong stakeholder management with technical and non-technical audiences; comfortable challenging scope with data while keeping delivery moving.
• Clear architecture documentation that holds up under technical and audit review.

• Fintech, payments, banking, lending or Open Banking experience — particularly across issuing and/or acquiring.
• Hands-on experience integrating with payments and card vendors (processors, acquirers, BIN sponsors, gateways, tokenisation providers).
• Card scheme flows (Visa/Mastercard), authorisation, clearing and settlement, chargebacks, tokenisation, 3DS, PCI DSS scope.
• Java / Spring Boot or similar backend stack.
• SQL plus caching (Redis/Memcached); document stores (MongoDB/DynamoDB).
• AWS: API Gateway, Lambda, EC2, VPC, SNS, SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB.
• Low-latency, high-availability or transactionally consistent systems for money movement.

• The architectural anchor for Spend – trusted across Issuer, Acquirer, Spend Platform, Payments and Purchase to make and defend the right call.
• A pragmatic owner who balances good design with delivery realities in a regulated, money-moving environment.
• Confident challenging decisions where security, scalability, compliance, scheme conformance or maintainability are at risk – respectfully and with data.
• A clear communicator who simplifies complex payments and platform concepts – including vendor trade-offs – for any audience.
• A mentor who raises engineering quality across Spend squads without becoming a bottleneck.