Overview
SOLUTION ARCHITECT – London
Reference Code: 393068-en_US
Contract Type: Permanent
Professional Communities: Architecture
Job Title: Cards – Solution Architect.
About the Job you are considering:
We are seeking an experienced Solution Architect to lead the end-to-end architecture of the Cards Infrastructure Gateway-the foundational layer enabling secure, scalable, and resilient connectivity between card platforms (issuing/acquiring) and external/payment networks. You will own the solution blueprint across transaction routing, authorization, settlement interfaces, tokenization, HSM integrations, ISO 8583/ISO 20022 messaging, and API mediation, ensuring compliance with PCI DSS and bank-grade security, resilience, and observability standards.
Scope & Ownership’.
Hybrid working:
The places that you work from day to day will vary according to your role, your needs, and those of the business; it will be a blend of Company offices, client sites, and your home; noting that you will be unable to work at home 100% of the time.
Your Role:
• Domains: Card issuing & acquiring, payment gateways, authorization/clearing, tokenization & cryptography, merchant onboarding, fraud controls integration (e.g., ARIC), dispute/chargeback flows.
• Systems: Legacy card switches, orchestration layers, API gateways, MQ/event buses, HSMs, data stores, and cloud/on-prem hybrid infrastructure.
• Interfaces: ISO 8583, ISO 20022, REST/gRPC, file-based batch, SFTP, message queues (Kafka/RabbitMQ), payment network connectors (e.g., Visa/Mastercard).
Your Skills:
You should have experience with
Architecture & Design
• Define the target architecture for the Cards Infra Gateway: ingress/egress, API mediation, message transformation, routing, resilience, and observability patterns.
• Design high-throughput, low-latency transaction flows (authorization, capture, reversal, refund, settlement), including real-time and batch interfaces.
• Establish non-functional requirements (NFRs): performance SLAs, HA (≥99.99%), DR (RPO/RTO), scalability, security, compliance, and cost efficiency.
• Create solution blueprints (context/container/component diagrams), sequence diagrams, and data flow models.
Security & Compliance
• Architect PCI DSS compliant solutions; enforce network segmentation, key management, mTLS, OAuth2, certificate lifecycle, and secrets management.
• Integrate HSMs for PIN, EMV, and token cryptography; design tokenization and PAN vault patterns with least privilege access.
• Align with regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, PSD2/SCA) and auditability (logging, traceability, data retention).
Integration & Platforms
• Define patterns for ISO 8583/ISO 20022 adapters, schema validation, and message transformation.
• Govern API design standards via API gateways (e.g., Apigee/Kong/Azure API Management) and service mesh (Istio/Linked) where applicable.
• Lead integration with card networks, switches, fraud platforms, merchant onboarding, CRM, and ledger/settlement systems.
Resilience, Operations & Observability
• Engineer for graceful degradation: circuit breakers, retries/backoff, idempotency, poison queue handling, and chaos testing.
• Define SRE-aligned practices: golden signals, SLO/SLA, capacity planning, autoscaling, canary/blue-green deployments.
• Standardize telemetry: distributed tracing (Open Telemetry), metrics (Prometheus/Grafana), and centralized logging (ELK).
Delivery Leadership & Governance
• Own solution approvals (Architecture Review Boards), ensure traceability from business capability to technology design.
• Partner with Product Owners, Engineering Leads, Security, and Risk to deliver incremental value, managing dependencies and risks.
• Provide technical leadership to engineers, ensuring adherence to design and coding standards; hands-on review of POCs and critical components.
We are a Disability Confident Employer:
Capgemini is proud to be a Disability Confident Employer (Level 2) under the UK Government’s Disability Confident scheme. As part of our commitment to inclusive recruitment, we will offer an interview to all candidates who:
- Declare they have a disability, and
- Meet the minimum essential criteria for the role.
Please opt in during the application process.
Make It Real (what does it mean for you):
- You’d be joining an accredited Great Place to work for Wellbeing in 2024. Employee wellbeing is vitally important to us as an organisation. We see a healthy and happy workforce a critical component for us to achieve our organisational ambitions.
To help support wellbeing we have trained ‘Mental Health Champions’ across each of our business areas, and we have invested in wellbeing apps such as Thrive and Peppy. - You will be empowered to explore, innovate, and progress. You will benefit from Capgemini’s ‘learning for life’ mindset, meaning you will have countless training and development opportunities from thinktanks to hackathons, and access to 250,000 courses with numerous external certifications from AWS, Microsoft, Harvard ManageMentor, Cybersecurity qualifications and much more.
- You will be joining one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies®, as recognised by Ethisphere® for 13 consecutive years. We live our values by making ethical business choices every day. Working ethically is at the centre of our culture at Capgemini, meaning you will be helping to create a future we can all be proud of.
Why you should consider Capgemini:
Growing clients’ businesses while building a more sustainable, more inclusive future is a tough ask. When you join Capgemini, you’ll join a thriving company and become part of a collective of free-thinkers, entrepreneurs and industry experts. We find new ways technology can help us reimagine what’s possible. It’s why, together, we seek out opportunities that will transform the world’s leading businesses, and it’s how you’ll gain the experiences and connections you need to shape your future. By learning from each other every day, sharing knowledge, and always pushing yourself to do better, you’ll build the skills you want. You’ll use your skills to help our clients leverage technology to innovate and grow their business. So, it might not always be easy, but making the world a better place rarely is.
About Capgemini:
Capgemini is an AI-powered global business and technology transformation partner, delivering tangible business value. We imagine the future of organisations and make it real with AI, technology and people. With our strong heritage of nearly 60 years, we are a responsible and diverse group of 420,000 team members in more than 50 countries. We deliver end-to-end services and solutions with our deep industry expertise and strong partner ecosystem, leveraging our capabilities across strategy, technology, design, engineering and business operations. The Group reported 2024 global revenues of €22.1 billion.
Make it real | www.capgemini.com
IMPORTANT: Before applying for this role, please make sure you have the right to work in the country where the role is based. Unless it clearly stipulates within in the job advert above that the hiring company is looking to or able to sponsor applicants it is deemed that the hiring employer will only consider applications from those able to comply with and work in the country where the role is based.
