Financial Crime Architecture Lead

Role Title: Financial Crime Architecture Lead (2783)

Division: Digital Functions and Technology

Location: Glasgow/London/Liverpool

Contract: Perm

About the Role

The Financial Crime Architecture Lead is a senior architecture role responsible for shaping the target-state financial crime technology ecosystem across transaction monitoring, client screening, onboarding, client risk, suitability, and investment mandate processes.

The role is central to creating a unified financial crime layer that brings together data, workflow, decisioning and user experience across ComplyAdvantage, OCS, Salesforce, Snowflake and supporting integration platforms.

The role will suit an experienced architecture leader who can combine financial crime domain understanding, platform strategy, integration design, data architecture, AI awareness and senior stakeholder influence to deliver a coherent, resilient and future-ready capability.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Own the end-to-end target architecture for financial crime technology, including transaction monitoring, client screening, onboarding, client risk rating, suitability and investment mandate integration.
• Define the strategic architecture for a unified financial crime data, workflow and user experience layer, ensuring clear separation of system-of-record, orchestration, decisioning, analytics and presentation responsibilities.
• Lead architectural assessment and rationalisation of OCS, ComplyAdvantage, Salesforce, Snowflake and other relevant platforms, identifying where capabilities should be consolidated, integrated or retired over time.
• Set the integration patterns, APIs, event flows, data contracts and security guardrails needed to connect screening, monitoring, onboarding, mandate and CRM journeys into a coherent operating model.
• Define the architecture for AI-enabled financial crime capabilities, including explainable alert optimisation, investigation summarisation, adverse media triage, anomaly detection and operational decision support.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Operations, Product, Data, Architecture, Cyber and delivery teams to translate financial crime outcomes into scalable technology patterns and delivery roadmaps.
• Ensure architecture decisions reduce operational friction, duplicate data entry, fragmented case handling and manual reconciliation across financial crime processes.
• Define architecture guardrails for resilience, security, auditability, data lineage, model governance, regulatory traceability and operational control across the financial crime ecosystem.
• Support vendor and sourcing decisions by assessing platform capability, AI readiness, integration effort, data coverage, extensibility, user experience, cost and long-term strategic fit.
• Act as the senior architecture voice in programme governance, ensuring short-term delivery choices remain aligned to the longer-term strategic platform ambition

About you

If you meet some of these criteria and are excited about the role, we encourage you to apply

• Significant experience shaping target architectures in complex, regulated financial services environments, ideally across financial crime, risk, compliance, client lifecycle or wealth management domains.
• Strong understanding of financial crime processes including AML, sanctions, PEP/adverse media screening, client risk rating, transaction monitoring, alert triage and case management.
• Strong command of enterprise architecture, solution architecture, CRM workflow, data platforms, API integration, event-driven patterns, cloud architecture and platform rationalisation.
• Good knowledge of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud or similar CRM/orchestration platforms, particularly where used for onboarding, servicing, tasks, cases and audit trails.
• Good appreciation of data architecture, data governance, lineage, controls, quality management and the operational implications of fragmented or duplicated data sources.
• Ability to evaluate vendor platforms pragmatically, balancing business capability, risk reduction, implementation complexity, integration effort and long-term maintainability.
• Confident senior stakeholder influencer, able to align Technology, Risk, Compliance, Operations and business stakeholders behind a clear architectural direction.
• Experience operating in product-centric and agile delivery environments, with the judgement to balance strategic architecture with incremental delivery.

Technical Skills & Engineering Requirements

• Strong technical understanding of SQL-based data platforms and modern analytical stores, ideally including Snowflake, with the ability to challenge data models, integration designs, performance patterns and governance controls.
• Good working knowledge of Python-based engineering and analytics patterns, including data transformation, automation, API interaction, model prototyping and reusable engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, event-driven integration, data contracts, canonical data models, message queues, batch processing and near-real-time data movement between vendor, CRM and enterprise data platforms.
• Experience defining cloud-native architecture patterns across identity, network, secrets management, encryption, monitoring, logging, observability, resilience and disaster recovery.
• Understanding of DevSecOps and engineering governance, including CI/CD, automated testing, code quality controls, infrastructure as code, release controls and environment management.
• Good appreciation of AI and machine learning architecture, including feature engineering, model lifecycle, explainability, human-in-the-loop controls, drift monitoring, model risk and responsible AI guardrails.
• Awareness of GenAI and LLM architecture patterns, including retrieval-augmented generation, prompt orchestration, vector search, grounding, hallucination controls, audit logging and secure use of sensitive data.
• Ability to design data and AI capabilities that are explainable, auditable, regulator-ready and aligned to financial crime risk appetite rather than black-box automation.
• Understanding of data privacy and security controls for sensitive financial crime data, including least privilege, role-based access, segregation of duties, retention, masking and controlled analytical access.
• Ability to produce architecture artefacts including capability maps, logical and physical architecture diagrams, sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, integration catalogues and decision records.

Measures of Success

• A clear and agreed target architecture for the unified financial crime layer, understood by Technology, Risk, Compliance and Operations stakeholders.
• Reduced fragmentation across screening, monitoring, onboarding, mandate and CRM workflows through reusable integration and architecture patterns.
• Robust architecture decisions that improve resilience, auditability, security, data quality, model governance and operational control.
• A credible multi-year roadmap that connects tactical Blossom delivery with the longer-term financial crime platform strategy.
• Improved confidence in vendor, platform and AI-enabled capability choices, supported by clear architectural rationale and transparent trade-offs.
• Evidence of reduced manual workarounds, duplicated data capture and disconnected case handling across financial crime journeys.
• Strong alignment to enterprise architecture with scalable, future-ready capabilities that support automation and AI over time.