Position Description
CGI is seeking an experienced Lead Enterprise Architect – Payments & Security to join our Financial Services practice and provide technical leadership on a long-term strategic engagement with a major financial services client.
This senior architecture role combines enterprise architecture leadership, deep payments domain expertise, security and controls knowledge, and hands-on solution architecture experience. The successful candidate will assess complex payment architectures, define target-state architecture and control patterns, and guide architecture and delivery teams through modernization and remediation initiatives.
The role requires the ability to operate across multiple business units and geographies, resolve complex architectural challenges, influence senior stakeholders, and translate enterprise architecture direction into practical technology solutions.
This is a hybrid position requiring attendance at our downtown Toronto and/or client office a minimum of two days per week, subject to change based on business and client requirements.
Your future duties and responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture and Strategy
- Assess complex current-state payment architectures and identify architectural risks, technology dependencies, security and control gaps, and modernization opportunities.
- Define and evolve target-state architecture across payment platforms, source systems, banking connectivity, processors, and related enterprise applications.
- Develop reusable reference architectures, design patterns, architectural principles, standards, and guardrails.
- Establish architectural direction for payment controls, including authentication, authorization, segregation of duties, account and payee verification, data protection, monitoring, reconciliation, and logging.
- Evaluate modernization, migration, consolidation, compensating-control, and decommissioning strategies.
Payments and Integration Architecture
- Provide architectural leadership across payment ecosystems involving payment hubs, payment rails, banking platforms, treasury systems, and enterprise applications.
- Lead integration architecture across source systems, payment platforms, and financial institutions.
- Design and evaluate integrations using APIs, SWIFT, host-to-host connectivity, and file-based processing.
- Apply a strong understanding of payment processing from initiation and transmission through settlement, reconciliation, and reporting.
- Assess integration dependencies, data flows, operational impacts, and architectural trade-offs.
Security, Risk, and Controls
- Embed security and control requirements into payment architecture and solution designs.
- Provide guidance on authentication and MFA, access management, segregation of duties, payment authorization, transaction monitoring, and anomaly detection.
- Partner with cybersecurity, operational risk, audit, compliance, and business stakeholders to ensure architecture decisions meet security, regulatory, and control expectations.
- Consider emerging payment technologies, evolving fraud patterns, business email compromise, account takeover, and AI-enabled threats in future-state architecture decisions.
- Support cybersecurity remediation and control-enhancement initiatives across enterprise payment environments.
Architecture Leadership and Governance
- Serve as a senior architecture authority for solution architects, technical teams, and delivery partners.
- Review and challenge solution designs to ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, security standards, and target-state direction.
- Resolve complex cross-platform design decisions and document architectural rationale, options, risks, and trade-offs.
- Lead and influence architects and delivery teams across multiple business units and geographies without relying on direct reporting authority.
- Present architecture recommendations, decision papers, and roadmaps to senior technology and business stakeholders.
- Translate complex technical matters into clear, decision-oriented business choices.
- Contribute to architecture governance forums, design reviews, standards, and enterprise technology roadmaps.
Required Qualifications To Be Successful In This Role
- 12+ years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, Solution Architecture, or a comparable senior technology architecture role.
- Demonstrated leadership on complex enterprise technology programs.
- Strong payments domain expertise, including payment hubs or platforms, banking connectivity, payment rails, settlement, reconciliation, and reporting.
- Experience designing integrations using SWIFT, APIs, host-to-host connectivity, and file-based processing.
- Strong understanding of payment security and fraud controls, including:
- Authentication and MFA
- Authorization controls
- Segregation of duties
- Account and payee verification
- Transaction monitoring
- Anomaly detection
- Data protection and audit logging
- Demonstrated experience defining and owning target-state architectures, reference architectures, architectural patterns, principles, and enterprise standards.
- Experience working in financial services, banking, insurance, or another highly regulated environment.
- Experience collaborating with distributed teams across multiple business units and geographies.
- Proven ability to influence senior architects, engineering teams, business stakeholders, cybersecurity teams, and delivery leaders.
- Excellent executive communication skills, including the ability to create concise, decision-oriented architecture materials.
Desired Qualifications And Experience
- Hands-on architecture experience with enterprise payment hubs and/or Treasury Management Systems.
- Knowledge of ISO 20022, real-time payments, and modern payment architectures.
- Experience with payment fraud prevention and controls related to business email compromise and account takeover.
- Experience supporting enterprise-scale cybersecurity remediation, technology modernization, or transformation programs.
- Familiarity with enterprise architecture repositories and architecture or modelling tools.
- Experience working across multiple regulatory jurisdictions.
- Knowledge of cloud, API-led, event-driven, and platform modernization architectures.
"CGI is providing a reasonable estimate of the pay range for this role. The determination of this range includes factors such as skill set level, geographic market, experience and training, and licenses and certifications. Compensation decisions depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $115,000–$165,000. This role is an existing vacancy."
""Disclaimer: Use of the term ‘architect’ in this job posting refers to the technical sense related to Information Technology (IT) and does not imply that the individual practices architecture or possesses the requisite license as prescribed by the applicable provincial or territorial architect regulator. We are seeking individuals with expertise in IT engineering-related functions, but licensure from an engineering regulator is not a prerequisite for this position. Architecture is a regulated profession in Canada which is restricted in terms of use of titles and designation.""
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