Charterhouse Partnership Hiring! Full Time Principal Architect, SVP-Director (Financial Technology - Payments Technology) – Exclusive Representation in - Ricebowl

This is an opportunity for an accomplished technology and architecture leader to shape the architectural direction behind large-scale, business-critical and high-transaction platforms, while raising engineering standards across the organisation.

The role goes beyond traditional Solution Architecture. You will have the mandate to define architecture governance, influence major technology decisions, build stronger engineering practices and drive the adoption of modern development approaches, including AI-assisted software engineering.

The successful individual will have the opportunity to shape how architecture and engineering are practised across the organisation, influence strategic technology decisions, raise engineering capability and help define how AI-assisted development is adopted responsibly at scale.

For a senior architect who still enjoys being close enough to technology to challenge designs and influence engineering outcomes, while having the mandate to operate at an organisational level, this is a particularly interesting opportunity.

The Role

As Principal Architect, you will provide both strategic and hands-on architectural leadership across complex technology initiatives, working closely with senior business stakeholders, engineering teams, architects, and clients. Key responsibilities include:

• Lead the architecture and design of complex, high-value and business-critical technology solutions, ensuring scalability, security, resilience, and maintainability.
• Establish and govern enterprise architecture principles, reference architectures, engineering standards, design patterns, and architecture review processes across multiple delivery teams.
• Act as the senior architecture escalation point for significant technology decisions, integration challenges, performance considerations, and architectural trade-offs.
• Partner with business stakeholders and delivery teams to translate strategic objectives into practical and sustainable technology architectures.
• Drive engineering excellence and modern software development practices, including architecture-driven delivery, Secure SDLC and specification-driven development.
• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted software engineering, including appropriate governance, standards and guardrails around tools used for code generation, testing, documentation, solution design, and engineering automation.
• Lead, mentor, and develop architects and technical leaders while strengthening engineering capability and knowledge sharing across the organisation.
• Support strategic client engagements, solutioning and selected pre-sales activities where senior architectural leadership is required.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for an established architecture leader who combines strong technical credibility with the ability to operate strategically across business, technology, and engineering teams.

Ideally, you will bring:

• 15+ years of experience across Software Engineering, Solution Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, or related technology leadership positions.
• Strong experience designing and governing large-scale, high-availability and high-transaction-volume platforms.
• Demonstrated experience establishing architecture standards, governance frameworks, reference patterns and review processes across multiple engineering or delivery teams.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering, integration, security, resilience, scalability, and operational architecture.
• Experience influencing senior stakeholders and cross-functional technology teams in complex enterprise environments.
• A track record of supporting major transformation programmes and strategic technology initiatives.
• An interest in, and ideally practical exposure to, AI-enabled engineering and emerging software development practices.

If you are currently based in Singapore and your experience aligns with the above, please reach out to me directly at ************* for a confidential discussion.