Principal AI Solution Architect

As an AI Solutions Architect at Backbase, you are the bridge between cutting-edge AI technology and highly regulated financial environments. You will lead the design of AI-powered banking architectures that are not only performant and scalable—but auditable, explainable, secure, and compliant by design. This role is crucial to supporting our market positioning as the AI-powered banking platform. You’ll work directly with sales teams, architects, and senior banking stakeholders to answer the hardest questions about AI compliance, governance, and trust. You’ll conceptualize, model, and communicate how AI fits into our customer ecosystems—especially where regulation meets innovation.

This is a customer-facing role involving strategic workshops, technical presentations, and hands-on engagements with global financial institutions. Regular national/international travel should be expected.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the architecture of enterprise-grade, complex banking solutions for strategic clients.
• Drive the technical aspects of the pre-sales process, ensuring alignment between client needs and Backbase capabilities.
• Design AI-centric architectures for banks that meet global compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, EU AI Act, DORA, Basel, EBA).
• Deliver architecture presentations and demos to C-level executives, risk officers, and IT decision-makers.
• Develop reusable architecture patterns for AI features across use cases like CLO, fraud detection, credit risk, and personalization.
• Collaborate with R&D and product leads to inform data governance, model explainability, and observability features.
• Map AI use cases to risk categories and propose controls like human-in-the-loop, champion-challenger, or sequential validation.
• Translate auditability and proportionality requirements into tangible platform and implementation controls.
• Interface with security, risk, and data privacy stakeholders on both client and internal sides.
• Provide strategic input on platform-wide “AI Factory” governance and integration principles.
• Contribute to internal enablement plans and mentor rising architects or engineers.

How about you?

• Your knowledge of the Java platform exceeds our expectations; 
• Experienced in Spring, Maven and Jenkins; 
• You have experience in Data, ML, AI Platforms, multi cloud, API, security, etc. As well as solution design and solution architecture, data architecture, AI domain.
• Relevant exposure to digital banking architectures, retail/wealth/business banking, or platform-driven transformation work.
• You have a demonstrable understanding of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), as well as Micro-Services Architecture; 
• JavaScript frameworks, MVC patterns and principles of REST APIs, ideally including RAML and/or OpenAPI, are second nature to you; 
• When we ask you about architectural frameworks, you easily dig up your knowledge and best practices; 
• You have professionally worked with Enterprise Integration Patterns and Frameworks; 
• And let’s not forget your broad, operational knowledge of application servers, databases, load balancers and other infrastructure components required to deploy web applications in a highly available and scalable environment; 
• Last but not least, you have excellent communication and presentation skills in English.

We will be extra happy if you: 

• Have created solutions for financial services (especially banking); 
• Have experience with Portal/Web Content Management; 
• Are familiar with architectural patterns, such as Microservices, CQRS, event sourcing; 
• Have experience with server virtualization and containers technology such as Docker, VMWare, HyperV; 
• Have professionally used Integration Platforms, API Gateway, etc.