Principal Payments Architect

We’re looking for a Principal Payments Architect to join our growing team in London. This is a specialised architectural leadership role focused on shaping and delivering enterprise-grade payment platforms - from gateway and authorisation layers through to clearing, settlement, and financial management.

This role is suited to someone who thrives in complex, high-stakes environments and operates confidently at the intersection of business strategy and technical execution. You will engage across the full lifecycle - from early discovery and architectural shaping through to delivery oversight - ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, commercially viable, and aligned to long-term platform strategy.

You will be responsible for designing robust, maintainable architectures that address real client challenges. You will define target-state platforms, challenge assumptions constructively, and ensure that technology decisions are grounded in strong domain expertise and measurable business outcomes.

What You’ll Be Doing

You will bring deep expertise in merchant acquiring and payment processing across both online and physical acceptance channels. This includes a strong understanding of gateway architecture, authorisation lifecycles, 3DS/SCA, scheme integrations, tokenisation, fraud decisioning, reconciliation, settlement, and financial ledger integration.

You will:

• Design and review scalable, resilient payment architectures capable of supporting high transaction volumes and demanding availability requirements
• Define and govern non-functional requirements including latency, throughput, availability, recoverability, observability, and security
• Shape API strategies, integration models, and event-driven or distributed system designs that support extensibility and regulatory compliance
• Contribute to PCI DSS scoping strategies and secure-by-design approaches within cloud and hybrid environments
• Participate in architectural governance forums, representing Endava with clarity and authority
• Support pre-sales and bid shaping activities by defining credible, commercially grounded target-state solutions
• Translate architectural decisions into clear executive narratives, articulating trade-offs, risks, and investment implications

You will be comfortable speaking the language of enterprise, solution, and data architects, and equally confident engaging in detailed technical discussions with engineering teams or strategic conversations with C-level stakeholders.

Where appropriate, you will explore the application of emerging capabilities - including AI-driven optimisation, intelligent routing, fraud modelling, and AIOps - ensuring innovation is grounded in practical, value-led use cases.