Principal Enterprise Architect

POSITION SUMMARY

Learn more about the general tasks related to this opportunity below, as well as required skills.

Bancontact Company is the leading provider of debit card payment experiences in Belgium, actively promoting a digital payments (r)evolution in the market. With our Bancontact card, Bancontact Pay app, and bank apps integrating our solutions, we serve the large majority of the Belgian community with more than 10 million cards and 6 million mobile app users. Bancontact Company develops new payment experiences for its consumers and merchants that want to pay or get paid online, in-store or with family and friends.

To bring the pace of these evolutions to the next level, we are looking for a Principal Enterprise Architect.

Are you passionate about payment architecture and want to shape the technical backbone of Belgium's digital evolution? Join our driven and enthusiastic team

The Principal Enterprise Architect reports to the Chief Technology Officer.

Job location:Brussels

RESPONSIBILITIES

The Principal Enterprise Architect sits within the Architecture, Technology and Security (ATS) department, which is organised around three strategic pillars:

FAST covers everything that keeps the platform running and responsive in real time: incident detection, crisis coordination, rapid response to service degradation, and merchant-facing operations continuity. Speed of reaction and quality of communication under pressure are the defining competencies here.

CORE is about structural solidity and operational consistency. It covers infrastructure monitoring, SLA governance, provider performance tracking, process standardisation, and architectural sovereignty of the payment scheme. Where FAST is reactive, CORE is systemic: it ensures the platform is measurable, governable, and improvable over time.

SECURE ensures that architecture and operational practices remain compliant with the regulatory and security frameworks Bancontact (BC) operates under: DORA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and the internal security standards governed by the (C)ISO function. Architecture reviews, decision records, and process maturity all feed directly into BC's compliance posture.

The Principal Enterprise Architect role sits primarily within CORE: taking ownership of the high-level Bancontact architecture and ensuring its consistency, governance, and long-term sovereignty. The role feeds SECURE through the security and resilience dimension of every architecture review,and supports FAST indirectly by anchoring lessons from incidents and operational evolutions into structural architecture decisions.

1. Principal enterprise architecture for Bancontact (CORE)

Architectural ownership and consistency

• Ownership of the high-level Bancontact architecture and act as principal architect for the payment ecosystem, ensuring architectural consistency across scheme services, across the infrastructure (including the Bancontact Pay app back-end, the mobile contactless infrastructure to support HCE and Apple Pay, the Certification Platform, Bancontact’s Acceptance Environment for Wero… ) and payment flows.
• Own and maintain the Bancontact high-level architecture, keeping it validated, current and reflective of major architectural changes.
• Maintain a structured architecture repository covering key components, owners, dependencies, environments, interfaces and criticality.
• Ensure that critical projects and components are reviewed against the reference architecture before implementation.
• Formalise key architecture decisions through architectural decision records.
• Develop and maintain reusable architecture patterns for the main payment domains, including Bancontact’s Acceptance Environment for Wero, the Bancontact Pay app back-end, the mobile contactless infrastructure to support HCE and Apple Pay, the Certification Platform and mobile payment flows.
• Organise and lead regular architecture reviews with ATS and relevant stakeholders.

2. Architecture review and validation of new assets (CORE + SECURE)

Formal review and governance of new assets

• Operate the architecture review process for new assets, components, integrations and major changes impacting the Bancontact ecosystem.
• Own and maintain the architecture review template and methodology used across the organisation.
• Ensure that critical new components or integrations carry a documented architecture review before go-live or formal implementation decisions.
• Provide timely architecture opinions on submitted review files.
• Lead major architecture reviews across the ecosystem, such as card authorisation interface infrastru