Principal Architect

We are looking for an experienced technologist with 15+ years of experience in front-office and trading technology who combines strong architectural judgment with practical engineering experience.

As a Principal Architect, you will provide architectural leadership and governance across the front-office trading technology landscape. You will be responsible for reviewing, challenging, approving, and governing technology solutions, ensuring they align with business objectives, engineering standards, operational resilience requirements, and regulatory obligations.

You will act as a trusted technical authority across the full trading lifecycle, leveraging real-world experience from large-scale trading environments to influence critical architectural decisions, modernization initiatives, and technology investments.

This role combines architecture governance with hands-on technical credibility. While a significant portion of the role involves maintaining architecture artefacts, driving Architecture Review Board (ARB) approvals, and supporting governance processes, you must also possess the depth and experience to engage engineering teams on complex technical challenges when required.

The successful candidate will be expected to challenge solutions not only from an architecture perspective, but also through the lenses of performance, scalability, resiliency, operability, risk, security, compliance and latency, drawing upon practical experience operating business-critical trading platforms in production.

Your team

Architecture Leadership & Governance

• Act as the senior architecture authority for front-office trading platforms and strategic technology initiatives.
• Own architecture standards, roadmaps, governance, and design artefacts.
• Lead architecture reviews through ARB and governance forums.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise architecture, security, resilience, and regulatory standards.
• Drive architectural simplification, consistency, reuse, and long-term technology alignment.

Technical Leadership

• Influence solution design through deep technical and engineering expertise.
• Provide architectural oversight across OMS, execution platforms, market connectivity, market data, risk controls, trade processing, and supporting infrastructure.
• Evaluate solutions for scalability, resilience, performance, security, observability, supportability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with engineering, infrastructure, security, risk, and business stakeholders to deliver pragmatic technology outcomes.

Performance, Scalability & Capacity Management

• Lead architecture for scalability, capacity planning, and sustainable platform growth.
• Ensure platforms can support increasing volumes, peak market events, and regulatory change.
• Drive performance optimization, operational efficiency, and simplification.
• Leverage observability, telemetry, and analytics to support capacity forecasting and resolve systemic bottlenecks.

Cloud, AI Adoption & Platform Modernization

• Guide adoption of cloud, hybrid, and modern architecture patterns.
• Drive modernization initiatives while balancing risk, performance, regulatory, and business requirements.
• Champion automation, platform engineering, resilience, observability, and operational excellence.
• Enable responsible AI adoption, establishing governance and guardrails in partnership with senior technology leaders

Challenges

• Balancing engineering pragmatism with governance, regulatory, and risk management requirements.
• Influencing technology direction across multiple teams without direct ownership.
• Supporting modernization initiatives while maintaining highly resilient and business-critical trading platforms.
• Navigating a complex stakeholder environment involving technology, business, risk, compliance, architecture, and operations teams.
• Making architectural decisions where performance, resilience, cost, and delivery priorities often compete.

Growth Opportunities

• Shape the architectural direction of mission-critical trading platforms used across global markets.
• Influence strategic technology investment decisions and modernization roadmaps.
• Drive adoption of next-generation cloud, AI, automation, and platform engineering capabilities.
• Gain broad exposure across trading, infrastructure, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, and senior technology leadership.
• Establish yourself as a trusted technical authority within one of the most complex and demanding technology environments in the industry.

Your expertise

• 15+ years of experience designing, delivering, or supporting technology solutions within investment banking, capital markets, or electronic trading environments, including practical experience with low-latency trading and latency-sensitive platforms.
• Deep understanding of the end-to-end trade lifecycle and its architectural impact across front, middle, and back-office platforms, with strong knowledge of OMS/EMS platforms and front-office trading architectures.
• Proven experience operating within complex, regulated financial institutions, balancing business objectives with risk, control, and APAC governance or regulatory requirements.
• Strong track record leading architecture governance, ARB reviews, and strategic technology decisions for business-critical platforms, with the ability to provide effective architectural challenge when required.
• Hands-on technical background with the ability to influence design decisions, challenge engineering teams, engage in deep technical discussions, and perform technical deep dives.
• Experience collaborating across Front Office, Product, Operations, Infrastructure, Risk, Compliance, Security, and Enterprise Architecture functions.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architectures, messaging platforms, sequencing technologies, and high-volume, mission-critical enterprise platforms.
• Proven experience in capacity planning, platform scaling, and performance optimization for enterprise-scale systems, including application, infrastructure, middleware, messaging, and network performance tuning.
• Familiarity with network telemetry, transaction tracing, packet capture analysis, and tools such as Corvil, with the ability to assess architectural decisions from both application and infrastructure performance perspectives.
• Passion for applying AI and intelligent automation to enhance engineering productivity, software delivery, operational support, architecture governance, platform engineering, and AI-assisted development, including some experience evaluating emerging AI technologies and identifying practical automation and efficiency opportunities.

S​YNECHRON’S DIVERSITY & INCLUSION STATEMENT
 

Diversity & Inclusion are fundamental to our culture, and Synechron is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative ‘Same Difference’ is committed to fostering an inclusive culture – promoting equality, diversity and an environment that is respectful to all. We strongly believe that a diverse workforce helps build stronger, successful businesses as a global company. We encourage applicants from across diverse backgrounds, race, ethnicities, religion, age, marital status, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities to apply. We empower our global workforce by offering flexible workplace arrangements, mentoring, internal mobility, learning and development programs, and more.

All employment decisions at Synechron are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to the applicant’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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