Solutions Architect

About the Position

Solutions Architect

We are seeking a Senior Solutions Architect with significant experience in software engineering to shape and govern the design of Zilch's Spend Domain.

About the Company

Zilch is a payment tech company on a mission to create the most empowering way to pay for anything, anywhere. Combining the best of debit, credit, and savings, we give our customers the option to earn instant cashback or spread the cost of pricier purchases, completely interest-free and with no late fees. Pretty great, right?

We started in 2018 with a small team and a big dream – to make credit accessible to all. Since then, we’ve achieved double unicorn status and taken on more than 5 million customers. There are some exciting projects coming up and we’ve got big growth plans.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture across the Spend Domain and keep designs coherent across squads.
• Design scalable, secure, cost-effective solutions that meet regulatory obligations (FCA, scheme rules, PCI DSS).
• Produce and maintain clear, auditable artefacts - diagrams, ADRs, and solution designs.
• Define and govern architectural standards, patterns, and best practices within Spend, aligned to Zilch-wide standards.
• Lead design reviews and post-incident architecture reviews; balance latency, resilience, maintainability, and cost.
• Guide the design of APIs, scheme/processor integrations, data flows, and event pipelines; champion API-first design and governance.
• Define reusable patterns (service templates, integration patterns, data contracts, eventing models) that Spend squads adopt.
• Evaluate, compare, and recommend third-party vendors and platforms across the payments ecosystem (processors, acquirers, gateways, BIN sponsors, tokenisation, and card issuing providers) - running structured assessments across capability, commercials, compliance, operational fit, and integration risk.
• Own vendor architecture decisions end-to-end: build-vs-buy analysis, RFP/PoC input, integration design, and ongoing review of vendor performance and lock-in risk.
• Remove architectural bottlenecks across multi-sprint, multi-squad efforts.
• Partner with product, operations, compliance, risk, finance, and fraud to turn problems into technology outcomes.
• Assess emerging tech (Open Banking, AI, cloud-native, new scheme capabilities) and prototype where useful.
• Coach engineers across Spend in architectural thinking and trade-off analysis.

Requirements

• Significant experience in software engineering, solution, or technical architecture, with production systems shipped at meaningful scale.
• Demonstrable ownership of architecture for a non-trivial system or domain in production.
• Strong experience designing cloud-based systems (AWS, Azure, or GCP), REST APIs, API gateways, and service-based architecture.
• Distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Solid grasp of integration patterns, middleware, data stores, and messaging platforms.
• Deep understanding of scalability, resilience, security, observability, and cost optimization as connected concerns.
• Track record of evaluating and integrating third-party vendors - structured comparisons, clear recommendations, and pragmatic integration designs that avoid unnecessary lock-in.
• Track record of leading design reviews and post-mortems across squads, and defining patterns that others reuse.
• Strong stakeholder management with technical and non-technical audiences; comfortable challenging scope with data while keeping delivery moving.
• Clear architecture documentation that holds up under technical and audit review.

Bonus Skills

• Fintech, payments, banking, lending, or Open Banking experience - particularly across issuing and/or acquiring.
• Hands-on experience integrating with payments and card vendors (processors, acquirers, BIN sponsors, gateways, tokenisation providers).
• Card scheme flows (Visa/Mastercard), authorisation, clearing and settlement, chargebacks, tokenisation, 3DS, PCI DSS scope.
• Java / Spring Boot or similar backend stack.
• SQL plus caching (Redis/Memcached); document stores (MongoDB/DynamoDB).
• AWS: API Gateway, Lambda, EC2, VPC, SNS, SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB.
• Low-latency, high-availability, or transactionally consistent systems for money movement.

What We Offer

• Hybrid work model in Kraków, Poland.
• Competitive salary and benefits.
• Opportunity to work with a fast-growing, innovative company.
• Collaborative and dynamic work environment.

About the Company

Zilch is a payment tech company on a mission to create the most empowering way to pay for anything, anywhere. Combining the best of debit, credit, and savings, we give our customers the option to earn instant cashback or spread the cost of pricier purchases, completely interest-free and with no late fees. Pretty great, right?

We started in 2018 with a small team and a big dream – to make credit accessible to all. Since then, we’ve achieved double unicorn status and taken on more than 5 million customers. There are some exciting projects coming up and we’ve got big growth plans.

Want to join us?