Assistant Vice President, Architecture

Job description

Job Summary As a Solution Architect for our client's large-scale financial/pension platform, you will play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, and governing end-to-end architectural solutions that align with business strategies and regulatory requirements. This platform handles millions of transactions for Hong Kong employers and employees, emphasizing security, resilience, scalability, and integration with financial ecosystems. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including business stakeholders, developers, and operations, to translate complex requirements into innovative, future-proof architectures. Drawing from best practices in financial services, you will focus on modem technologies like event-driven, microservices, and API integrations to optimize performance, reduce technical debt, and ensure compliance with security, privacy and other regulatory guidelines. This is a strategic role for a mid-senior level professional with a proven track record in architecting mission-critical systems in finance or similar high-stakes environments. Key Responsibilities • Lead the design and development of comprehensive solution architectures for the pension platform, encompassing software components, data models, integrations, infrastructure, and security frameworks to support high-volume transactions and user interactions. • Collaborate with business stakeholders, product managers, and domain experts to translate business objectives into capability maps, value streams, and prioritized roadmaps, ensuring alignment with strategic goals such as regulatory compliance, customer experience enhancement, and operational efficiency. • Define and maintain enterprise architecture principles, standards, and guardrails across applications, data platforms, cloud environments, and security protocols; conduct architecture reviews to resolve dependencies, trade-offs, and ensure adherence to target-state blueprints. • Identify, assess, and mitigate technical and business debt, including legacy systems, integration complexities, data quality issues, and security vulnerabilities, by developing actionable remediation strategies and prioritizing IT initiatives based on ROI, risk reduction, and business impact. • Drive the adoption of modem architecture patterns, including microservices, containerization (e.g., Kubemetes), event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka), API-driven development, and hybrid cloud solutions, while promoting reuse of services to minimize duplication and accelerate delivery. • Perform research, prototyping, and evaluation of emerging technologies to validate options and introduce innovations that enhance platform resilience, performance, and scalability for mmions of users. • Act as a technical escalation point for complex challenges, troubleshooting architectural issues, and facilitating design and code reviews to maintain high standards and avoid overly complicated implementations. • Govern key projects through agile and DevOps methodologies, including continuous integration, test-driven development, and automation, while building networks with third-party vendors for seamless integrations. • Ensure solutions are compliant with financial regulations, data privacy standards (e.g., PDPO in Hong Kong), and industry best practices, with a focus on security-by-design and disaster recovery. • Mentor junior architects and development teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and alignment with market trends in financial technology. Requirements and Qualifications • Bachelor's degree or higher in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. • 8+ years of hands-on experience in IT, with at least 4 years in solution or enterprise architecture roles, preferably in financial services, pension management, insurance, or large-scale transactional platforms (e.g., banking, gaming, or aviation systems with high user volumes). • Proven track record in architecting complex, scalable systems handling millions of users, with experience in regulatory environments and compliance-driven designs. • Strong understanding of business strategy in financial/pension sectors, including MPF schemes, retirement planning, and employer/employee servicing models in Hong Kong. • Fanuliarity with agile/DevOps principles, test-driven development, continuous integration, and modem software architectures (e.g., API-driven, domain-driven design, 4+1 architectural views). • Experience in assessing and managing technical debt, creating business cases for IT investments, and influencing C-level stakeholders with clear ROI narratives. • Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical visions to non-technical audiences, facilitate workshops, and resolve conflicts through creative problem-solving. • Proficiency in English and Cantonese; Putonghua is a plus. • Willingness to travel occasionally for project needs. • Certifications such as TOGAF, SAFe or equivalent are highly preferred. Essential Skills • Technical Expertise: Deep knowledge of container platforms (e.g., OpenShift, Kubemetes), streaming/messaging (e.g., Kafka, JMS), programming languages/frameworks (e.g., Java Spring Boot, React.jsNue.js, JavaScript), and databases (RDBMS like Oracle/PostgreSQL and NoSQL like Redis/MongoDB) • Architecture Patterns: Microservices, event-driven architectures, cloud/hybrid environments, security-by-design, data modeling, and integration strategies. • Financial Domain Knowledge: Understanding of pension platforms, regulatory compliance, risk management, and high-availability systems for financial transactions. • Soft Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, collaborative mindset for coaching teams, innovation in emerging tech (e.g., AI Automation), and pragmatic decision-making under constraints.