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)

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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

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Assess existing solutions (in-house and acquired/inherited) to identify architectural debt, integration gaps, and duplicated capabilities; define and prioritise a remediation roadmap

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Design new solutions to be integration-ready and debt-conscious from day one — avoiding the creation of tomorrow's legacy problems

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Define target-state architecture and phased migration paths that move legacy systems toward the target state without disrupting live operations

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Establish and enforce architectural guardrails — new and existing — must design against

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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

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Build and maintain a technical debt register/inventory across the platform, with clear ownership, risk scoring, and business impact tied to each item

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Champion technical debt reduction as a first-class priority in planning cycles, not an afterthought — balancing it explicitly against new feature delivery

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Identify and eliminate redundant systems, data stores, and integration patterns as new solutions come online, rather than letting them accumulate alongside old ones

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Define "definition of done" standards that prevent new debt (test coverage, documentation, decoupling, observability) as part of every solution delivered

Integration (internal and external)

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Design the integration layer connecting internal solutions to each other and to external parties

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Establish consistent integration patterns (API-first) to replace ad hoc, point-to-point connections between systems

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Own API strategy and governance across the platform, ensuring internal and external interfaces are consistent, versioned, secure, and well-documented

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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

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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

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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

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Establish data governance, lineage, access control, and privacy-by-design controls for shared client data, in line with financial regulatory requirements

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Partner with Engineering, Product and Info Sec to define standards for data quality, consent management, and cross-border data handling where applicable

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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

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Architect for high availability, fault tolerance, and low-latency transaction processing at scale

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Lead architectural reviews, set design standards, and ensure consistency across engineering teams working on new and legacy solutions alike

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Mentor senior and staff engineers; act as technical escalation point for complex, cross-team, cross-system problems

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Produce and maintain architecture documentation, decision records, a technical debt register, and system/data-flow diagrams

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Support due diligence, audits, and regulatory examinations with clear technical documentation of both current and target-state architecture

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Stay current on emerging fintech technology trends and assess their applicability

What We're Looking For

Required:

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15+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in a solution/enterprise architect role

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Proven experience architecting systems in fintech

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Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, and API design

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Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferably) and infrastructure-as-code

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Strong knowledge of financial industry compliance and security standards (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR or equivalent)

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Experience designing for high-throughput, low-latency, transactional systems requiring strong consistency and auditability

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Excellent communication skills, with experience presenting architecture decisions to technical, executive and even high level customer audiences

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Experience with database technologies spanning relational, NoSQL, and event-streaming systems

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Demonstrated track record of modernising or migrating legacy systems while they remain live in production, without disrupting the business

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Hands-on experience designing integration layers across heterogeneous systems (internal platforms, acquired systems, external vendors/partners) using event-driven and API-first patterns

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Experience designing or implementing a data lake, data warehouse, or shared data platform including governance, access control, and lineage

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Demonstrated ability to identify, quantify, and drive down technical debt at an organisational level — not just within a single team or codebase

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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:

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Prior experience in a scale-up fintech environment, including legacy-to-cloud migrations and post-acquisition platform integration

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Experience with data mesh or federated data governance models across