Senior Director, Head of Enterprise Architecture

Flywire•Chicago, IL

4d•$245,000 - $295,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Flywire is seeking a Head of Architecture to serve as the strategic technical partner to the Chief Technology Officer and lead the evolution of Flywire’s enterprise architecture. This leader will define the long-term architecture strategy for our global payments platform while ensuring our technology ecosystem scales with Flywire’s continued growth. This role will be responsible for establishing architecture standards, guiding major platform decisions, and driving evolution and modernization across Flywire’s technology stack. The Head of Architecture will partner closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and infrastructure teams to ensure alignment of direction, goals and roadmaps. The ideal candidate is a highly experienced enterprise architect who has built and scaled global platforms in complex distributed environments and thrives operating at the intersection of technology strategy and engineering execution. The head of Architecture is first and foremost passionate about Technology, leads with AI first mindset, detailed oriented and hands on when required.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering and architecture leadership roles.
Proven experience as an Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, or Distinguished Engineer in large-scale technology environments.
Deep expertise designing highly scalable distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
Experience building architecture strategies for global platforms handling high-volume transaction workloads.
Strong background in microservices architectures, APIs, and event-driven systems.
Experience operating in complex regulated industries such as fintech, payments, or financial services.
Demonstrated ability to influence engineering organizations and drive architectural standards across distributed teams.
Strong collaboration skills with the ability to partner across engineering, product, and executive leadership.
Strong communication skills with the ability to represent and advocate Technology matters across the company and including C suite.
Experience leading architecture initiatives within global engineering organizations.

Responsibilities

Define and maintain the enterprise architecture strategy for Flywire’s global payments platform and software solutions.
Establish architecture standards across application, platform, data, and infrastructure layers.
Drive architectural alignment, foster a culture of technical excellence and architectural discipline across engineering teams operating globally.
Build and mentor a small team of domain and platform architects.
Lead initiatives to modernize and rationalize different legacy systems and evolve Flywire’s common platform architecture.
Guide the adoption of modern architecture patterns including microservices, cloud-native infrastructure, and distributed systems.
Establish architecture governance frameworks including architecture review boards and design standards.
Ensure architectural decisions support long-term scalability, security, and compliance requirements while containing or reducing technical debt.
Serve as a strategic advisor to the CTO on technology investment decisions and platform evolution.
Evaluate emerging technologies and guide adoption of innovations that improve engineering velocity and platform capabilities.
Lead technical due diligence process during M&A and strategic partnership initiatives.
Partner closely with engineering, product, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure architectural alignment across initiatives.
Work with global engineering teams across multiple regions to drive consistent architecture standards