Payment Operations Architect

Wells Fargo & Company•Westlake, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

About this role: Wells Fargo is seeking a Principal Architect to serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining and advancing the target state architecture for platforms and products within COO Technology. This role acts as a strategic bridge between business objectives and technical execution, ensuring architectural integrity, innovation, and delivery excellence. You will support product strategy for Shared Services and Payment Operations initiatives and enable domain-aligned engineering teams through architectural governance and design authority. In this role, you will: Define and evolve target state architecture across business, application, data, and technology domains, ensuring alignment with enterprise strategy and capability models. Develop and maintain architecture roadmaps and transition states that support CIO-approved strategies and product portfolio objectives. Act as a strategic advisor to senior leadership, shaping enterprise architecture strategies for highly complex business and technical needs. Lead build vs. buy assessments and influence investment planning through architecture decision records and strategic reviews. Guide engineering teams on architectural decisions, patterns, and implementation strategies, ensuring traceability to Architecture Specifications and alignment with product backlogs. Ensure compliance with non-functional requirements (NFRs), SRE principles, and security standards, embedding these into engineering and testing practices. Drive modernization initiatives including cloud migration, application rationalization, and microservices adoption, with a focus on portfolio optimization. Provide comprehensive architecture governance, including assurance reviews, risk posture monitoring, and participation in forums such as ACAB and Architecture Council. Integrate AI/ML and LLM capabilities into enterprise workflows to support intelligent automation and agentic systems, and lead innovation through POCs and emerging tech evaluations. Contribute to reusable architectural patterns, frameworks, and tooling that support federated architecture enablement and standardization across domains. Collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to translate strategic objectives into actionable technical solutions, and mentor Domain Design Authorities to foster architectural alignment and delivery excellence. Maintain deep knowledge of emerging technologies and recommend innovations that deliver competitive advantage and influence vendor roadmaps.

Requirements

7+ years of engineering experience with a strong foundation in systems design and enterprise architecture.
7+ years of experience in strategic planning and architectural leadership within large-scale environments.
7+ years of experience in leading complex technical initiatives and delivering scalable, resilient solutions.

Nice To Haves

Expertise in enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF, COBIT, IT4IT).
Deep experience with cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker).
Preferred experience within the Payment Operations domain.
Pega Architecture experience
Strong background in microservices architecture, distributed systems, and platform engineering.
Experience with AI/ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch) and LLM platforms.
Familiarity with agentic AI systems and autonomous decision-making architectures.
Proficiency in modeling tools such as UML, ArchiMate, or similar.
Strong communication, influencing, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Experience in application security, performance optimization, and resiliency engineering

Responsibilities

Define and evolve target state architecture across business, application, data, and technology domains, ensuring alignment with enterprise strategy and capability models.
Develop and maintain architecture roadmaps and transition states that support CIO-approved strategies and product portfolio objectives.
Act as a strategic advisor to senior leadership, shaping enterprise architecture strategies for highly complex business and technical needs.
Lead build vs. buy assessments and influence investment planning through architecture decision records and strategic reviews.
Guide engineering teams on architectural decisions, patterns, and implementation strategies, ensuring traceability to Architecture Specifications and alignment with product backlogs.
Ensure compliance with non-functional requirements (NFRs), SRE principles, and security standards, embedding these into engineering and testing practices.
Drive modernization initiatives including cloud migration, application rationalization, and microservices adoption, with a focus on portfolio optimization.
Provide comprehensive architecture governance, including assurance reviews, risk posture monitoring, and participation in forums such as ACAB and Architecture Council.
Integrate AI/ML and LLM capabilities into enterprise workflows to support intelligent automation and agentic systems, and lead innovation through POCs and emerging tech evaluations.
Contribute to reusable architectural patterns, frameworks, and tooling that support federated architecture enablement and standardization across domains.
Collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to translate strategic objectives into actionable technical solutions, and mentor Domain Design Authorities to foster architectural alignment and delivery excellence.
Maintain deep knowledge of emerging technologies and recommend innovations that deliver competitive advantage and influence vendor roadmaps.