Chief Architect

So, what’s the role all about? 

The Chief Architect at NiCE Actimize owns the technical vision that holds this portfolio together. The mandate is to ensure that a wide-ranging set of products remains coherent, secure, scalable, and economical to build and operate regardless of where and how it is deployed. This is a hands-on leadership role at the intersection of deep technical authority and enterprise strategy: you will set architectural direction, resolve the hardest cross-cutting trade-offs, and raise the engineering bar across the organization. 

This is the most senior individual-contributor-plus-leadership technical role in the company. You will be a trusted advisor to the executive team and the final technical authority on architecture decisions that span products.

How will you make an impact?  

Architectural Vision & Strategy 

• Define and own the multi-year target architecture across the entire product suite, balancing product autonomy with shared platform leverage. 

• Establish an architecture strategy so that products can be delivered on-premise, in private cloud, in public cloud, or as pure cloud SaaS. 

• Drive the platform and shared-services strategy (identity, data, integration, observability, deployment tooling) that reduces fragmentation across products. 

• Help architects translate business and product strategy into technical roadmaps; advise the executive team on build-vs-buy, modernization, and major technology bets. 

• Design abstractions and packaging models that let a single product run reliably across heterogeneous environments with differing scale, network, data residency, and operational constraints. 

• Establish reference architectures and patterns for tenancy, configuration management, release/upgrade cadence, and feature parity across on-premise and cloud-hosted deployments. 

Security, Compliance & Resilience 

• Embed security, privacy, and regulatory compliance into the architecture by design — addressing the standards relevant to financial services (e.g., data protection, auditability, segregation, encryption, and regional data residency). 

• Define non-functional requirements and architectural guardrails for availability, disaster recovery, transactional integrity, performance, and observability appropriate to mission-critical financial systems. 

• Partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance leadership to ensure the architecture withstands audit and regulatory scrutiny across jurisdictions. 

Governance & Standards 

• Establish and run an architecture governance function: standards, decision records, review processes, and a technology radar — proportionate enough to enable speed rather than obstruct it. 

• Evaluate and select core technologies, platforms, and strategic vendors; own the long-term technology stack direction. 

Leadership & Influence 

• Lead and mentor a community of architects and senior engineers; grow architectural capability across teams. 

• Build consensus across product, engineering, security, operations, and commercial stakeholders, and make decisive calls when consensus isn't reachable. 

• Represent the company's technical vision with key customers, partners, and prospects, and in due-diligence and pre-sales conversations for strategic deals. 

Have you got what it takes?  

• 12+ years in software engineering with a sustained track record in senior architecture roles; significant experience as a principal or chief-level architect. 

• Demonstrated ownership of architecture for enterprise-grade products delivered across multiple deployment models — on-premise and cloud/SaaS — not solely cloud-native or solely on-premise. 

• Deep, current expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenancy, data architecture, API/integration design, and at least one major public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), alongside containerization and orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes). 

• Strong command of security and resilience engineering for systems handling sensitive, high-stakes data. 

• Experience operating in regulated environments, ideally financial services, with a working understanding of relevant compliance and audit obligations. 

• Proven ability to lead technically without direct authority — influencing senior engineers, product leaders, and executives. 
  
  
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to move fluidly between board-level strategy and code-level detail. 

You will have an advantage if you also have:

• Direct fintech, banking, payments, capital markets, or financial-crime/compliance domain experience. 

• Experience evolving a legacy on-premise product portfolio toward cloud and SaaS without abandoning existing enterprise customers. 

• Familiarity with multi-region data residency, sovereignty, and localization requirements. 

• Experience with FinOps / cloud cost governance at scale. 

• Background contributing to or representing the company in security certifications and frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS) relevant to fintech. 

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 

What’s in it for you?

Join an ever-growing, market-disrupting, global company where the teams – comprised of the best of the best – work in a fast-paced, collaborative, and creative environment! As the market leader, every day at NiCE is a chance to learn and grow, and there are endless internal career opportunities across multiple roles, disciplines, domains, and locations. If you are passionate, innovative, and excited to constantly raise the bar, you may just be our next NiCEr!

Enjoy NiCE-FLEX!

At NiCE, we work according to the NiCE-FLEX hybrid model, which enables maximum flexibility: 2 days working from the office and 3 days of remote work, each week. Naturally, office days focus on face-to-face meetings, where teamwork and collaborative thinking generate innovation, new ideas, and a vibrant, interactive atmosphere.

Requisition ID: 10947
Reporting into: Vice President, Engineering
Role Type: People Manager

#LI-Hybrid

About NICE Actimize:

NICE Actimize is the largest and broadest provider of financial crime, risk and compliance solutions for regional and global financial institutions, as well as government regulators. Consistently ranked as number one in the space, NICE Actimize experts apply innovative technology to protect institutions and safeguard consumers’ and investors’ assets by identifying financial crime, preventing fraud and providing regulatory compliance.