Platform Architect
Fintua is a global leader in indirect tax compliance and tax technology. Our all-in-one platform streamlines global VAT compliance, recovery, eInvoicing and payments, helping businesses navigate the complex indirect tax landscape with ease and confidence.
Fintua is part of CluneTech, a suite of companies providing cutting-edge solutions that simplify global business. We have been recognised as a Great Place to Work for 11 consecutive years, a Best Workplace for Women for the past 7 years and most recently, a Best Workplace in Tech for the past 6 years.
This role requires a minimum of 2 days per week in our Kilkenny office.
About the Role
We're looking for a Principal Platform Architect to own the technical vision and architectural integrity of our fintech platform — spanning both new solution design and existing systems already in production. This is a dual mandate: architect greenfield capabilities while simultaneously rationalizing and modernizing what's already built, so the platform grows as one coherent system rather than a collection of point solutions.
You'll be the primary technical authority ensuring that as we expand — new products, new markets, new acquisitions, new integrations — the platform stays unified, secure, and maintainable rather than accumulating fragmentation and technical debt.
A central focus of this role is seamless integration: making sure new and legacy solutions interoperate cleanly, share common data and identity models, and are built (or refactored) against a consistent set of architectural standards. You will also lead the strategy and implementation path toward a shared data lake / data platform, giving individual solutions across the combined platform governed, real-time access to underlying client data — eliminating duplicated data stores, inconsistent client views, and brittle point-to-point integrations between systems.
The Principal Platform Architect owns architecture strategy, standards and target-state design. Engineering Leads remain accountable for delivery execution and team management
What You'll Do
Unified platform architecture (new + existing)
Own end-to-end solution architecture across both new product initiatives and existing production systems, ensuring one coherent architectural vision rather than parallel, disconnected roadmaps
Assess existing solutions (in-house and acquired/inherited) to identify architectural debt, integration gaps, and duplicated capabilities; define and prioritise a remediation roadmap
Design new solutions to be integration-ready and debt-conscious from day one — avoiding the creation of tomorrow's legacy problems
Define target-state architecture and phased migration paths that move legacy systems toward the target state without disrupting live operations
Establish and enforce architectural guardrails — new and existing — must design against
Define and drive architectural standards for AI and agentic capabilities across model integration, observability, auditability, security, and responsible AI controls, ensuring solutions are secure, well-engineered, and consistently designed across the enterprise.
Technical debt reduction
Build and maintain a technical debt register/inventory across the platform, with clear ownership, risk scoring, and business impact tied to each item
Champion technical debt reduction as a first-class priority in planning cycles, not an afterthought — balancing it explicitly against new feature delivery
Identify and eliminate redundant systems, data stores, and integration patterns as new solutions come online, rather than letting them accumulate alongside old ones
Define "definition of done" standards that prevent new debt (test coverage, documentation, decoupling, observability) as part of every solution delivered
Integration (internal and external)
Design the integration layer connecting internal solutions to each other and to external parties
Establish consistent integration patterns (API-first) to replace ad hoc, point-to-point connections between systems
Own API strategy and governance across the platform, ensuring internal and external interfaces are consistent, versioned, secure, and well-documented
Act as the technical lead for evaluating and onboarding new external integrations and partners, assessing architectural and security fit before commitments are made
Data lake / shared data platform
Define the architecture and roadmap for a shared data lake enabling every solution on the combined platform to access underlying client data through governed, consistent interfaces
Design the data model, ingestion pipelines, and access patterns so individual solutions can read (and where appropriate, write) shared client data without duplicating or forking it
Establish data governance, lineage, access control, and privacy-by-design controls for shared client data, in line with financial regulatory requirements
Partner with Engineering, Product and Info Sec to define standards for data quality, consent management, and cross-border data handling where applicable
Drive migration of solutions currently holding siloed/duplicated client data onto the shared data layer, in a phased and low-risk manner
Governance, compliance & leadership
Architect for high availability, fault tolerance, and low-latency transaction processing at scale
Lead architectural reviews, set design standards, and ensure consistency across engineering teams working on new and legacy solutions alike
Mentor senior and staff engineers; act as technical escalation point for complex, cross-team, cross-system problems
Produce and maintain architecture documentation, decision records, a technical debt register, and system/data-flow diagrams
Support due diligence, audits, and regulatory examinations with clear technical documentation of both current and target-state architecture
Stay current on emerging fintech technology trends and assess their applicability
What We're Looking For
Required:
15+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in a solution/enterprise architect role
Proven experience architecting systems in fintech
Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, and API design
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferably) and infrastructure-as-code
Strong knowledge of financial industry compliance and security standards (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR or equivalent)
Experience designing for high-throughput, low-latency, transactional systems requiring strong consistency and auditability
Excellent communication skills, with experience presenting architecture decisions to technical, executive and even high level customer audiences
Experience with database technologies spanning relational, NoSQL, and event-streaming systems
Demonstrated track record of modernising or migrating legacy systems while they remain live in production, without disrupting the business
Hands-on experience designing integration layers across heterogeneous systems (internal platforms, acquired systems, external vendors/partners) using event-driven and API-first patterns
Experience designing or implementing a data lake, data warehouse, or shared data platform including governance, access control, and lineage
Demonstrated ability to identify, quantify, and drive down technical debt at an organisational level — not just within a single team or codebase
Working knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks and models (e.g. TOGAF, Zachman, or equivalent), and experience applying them to structure architecture practice — governance, architecture vision, target-state definition, transition/migration planning — in a real engineering organisation
Preferred:
Prior experience in a scale-up fintech environment, including legacy-to-cloud migrations and post-acquisition platform integration
Experience with data mesh or federated data governance models across multiple product teams
Experience with containerization and orchestration
Familiarity with master data management or customer 360 initiatives in a regulated data environment
Relevant certifications (TOGAF 9/10, AWS/GCP/Azure Architect, CISSP, Data Engineering/Architecture certifications)
Recognised as a both a Great Place to Work and Deloitte Best Managed Company, we believe that recognition goes much deeper than just financial rewards. Therefore, in addition to a competitive salary, we also offer an exclusive benefits package that includes:
Competitive pension
Flexible Working Policy with a combination of remote and office working and a flexible approach to working hours
Competitive annual leave and a number of other leaves including IVF, compassion, marriage, maternity and paternity leave
Employee-led CSR Programme, CluneTech Cares, with one paid Volunteer Day per year
Death in Service Benefit
Milestone Recognition Programme
Professional & Personal Development
Rewards & Recognition
Employee Wellbeing Programme, CluneTech Life
Fintua is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees. We are committed to building and maintaining a culture which is free from discrimination and harassment and where all employees can bring their best selves to work.
- Division
- Fintua
- Department
- Tech
- Locations
- Kilkenny, Ireland
- Remote status
- Hybrid