Associate Director, Solution Architecture

Principal responsibilities

• Solution architecture from discovery through delivery, ensuring alignment to business goals, constraints, and non-functional requirements (NFRs).
• Produce solution options and recommend pragmatic trade-offs across cost, risk, time-to-market, and strategic alignment.
• Define end-to-end architecture covering channel/application components, integration/API design, data flows, infrastructure/cloud, identity and access management, and observability.
• Create and maintain architecture artefacts (e.g., context/container diagrams, sequence flows, deployment views, NFRs, ADRs) appropriate to the delivery model.
• Embed security-by-design, privacy, and data protection controls; support threat modelling and security reviews with relevant stakeholders.
• Ensure solutions meet regulatory and internal control requirements (e.g., auditability, data residency/retention where applicable).
• Provide architecture guidance to engineering teams; review key designs, changes, and implementation plans to reduce rework and delivery risk.
• Drive reuse of approved platforms, patterns, and reference architectures; contribute to reduction of technical debt and duplication.
• Define operability requirements (monitoring/alerting, logging, capacity, DR/BCP, runbooks) in partnership with service management/SRE.
• Identify and manage cross-team dependencies and technical RAID; escalate decisions and risks through appropriate governance forums.
• Contribute to architecture communities of practice, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing across Technology.

Key stakeholders

• Business sponsors, Product Owners, and delivery leadership
• Engineering leads, DevSecOps teams, SRE/Operations, Service Management
• Cybersecurity, IAM, Data/Privacy, Risk and Controls
• Enterprise Architecture and architecture assurance/review forums
• Third-party vendors/partners (where applicable)

Skills, knowledge and experience

Essential

• Demonstrable experience delivering solution architecture for complex, multi-system change.
• Strong understanding of modern architecture patterns (API-led integration, microservices, event-driven, cloud-native) and legacy integration/modernisation.
• Ability to define, quantify, and validate NFRs (availability, performance, resilience, scalability, security, maintainability).
• Security-by-design knowledge (IAM, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, secure SDLC).
• Strong communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in agile delivery environments and collaborating across multiple teams.

Desirable

• Financial services/banking domain experience.
• Cloud certification and/or architecture certification (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP, TOGAF).
• Experience with large-scale data platforms and integration tooling.
• Familiarity with SRE principles and operational readiness practices.

Governance, risk and controls

• Supports architecture assurance and review processes; maintains decision records and evidence suitable for audit.
• Ensures solutions meet HSBC security, data, resilience, and operational requirements, escalating exceptions appropriately.

Success measures

• Reduced rework through clear architecture direction and early risk identification.
• Improved resilience/performance and fewer production incidents attributable to design.
• Strong control outcomes with minimal exceptions and timely remediation.
• Increased reuse of standard patterns/platforms and reduced technology sprawl.