Senior Director, Head of Enterprise Architecture (, IL, United States)

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Passion, excitement & global collaboration are all core to what it means to be a FlyMate. At Flywire, we’re on a mission to deliver the world’s most important and complex payments. We use our Flywire Advantage - the combination of our next-gen payments platform, proprietary payment network and vertical specific software, to help our clients get paid, and help their customers pay with ease - no matter where they are in the world.

Who we are:

Flywire is a global payments enablement and software company, founded more than a decade ago to solve high-stakes, high-value payments in higher education. We’ve since scaled into new regions and industry verticals and expanded our product offerings to deliver meaningful value to our clients around the world.

Today we support more than 4,800 clients across the global education, healthcare, travel & B2B industries, with diverse payment methods across 240 countries & territories and more than 140 currencies.

With over 1,200 global FlyMates, representing more than 40 nationalities, and in 12 offices world-wide, we’re looking for FlyMates to join the next stage of our journey as we continue to grow.

The Opportunity:

Flywire is seeking a Head of Architecture to serve as the strategic technical partner to the Chief Technology Officer and lead the evolution of Flywire’s enterprise architecture. This leader will define the long-term architecture strategy for our global payments platform while ensuring our technology ecosystem scales with Flywire’s continued growth.

This role will be responsible for establishing architecture standards, guiding major platform decisions, and driving evolution and modernization across Flywire’s technology stack. The Head of Architecture will partner closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and infrastructure teams to ensure alignment of direction, goals and roadmaps.

The ideal candidate is a highly experienced enterprise architect who has built and scaled global platforms in complex distributed environments and thrives operating at the intersection of technology strategy and engineering execution. The head of Architecture is first and foremost passionate about Technology, leads with AI first mindset, detailed oriented and hands on when required.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain the enterprise architecture strategy for Flywire’s global payments platform and software solutions.
• Establish architecture standards across application, platform, data, and infrastructure layers.
• Drive architectural alignment, foster a culture of technical excellence and architectural discipline across engineering teams operating globally.
• Build and mentor a small team of domain and platform architects.

Technology Governance:

• Lead initiatives to modernize and rationalize different legacy systems and evolve Flywire’s common platform architecture.
• Guide the adoption of modern architecture patterns including microservices, cloud-native infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Establish architecture governance frameworks including architecture review boards and design standards.
• Ensure architectural decisions support long-term scalability, security, and compliance requirements while containing or reducing technical debt.

Strategic Technology Leadership:

• Serve as a strategic advisor to the CTO on technology investment decisions and platform evolution.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and guide adoption of innovations that improve engineering velocity and platform capabilities.
• Lead technical due diligence process during M&A and strategic partnership initiatives.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Partner closely with engineering, product, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure architectural alignment across initiatives.
• Work with global engineering teams across multiple regions to drive consistent architecture standards

Here’s What We’re Looking For:

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering and architecture leadership roles.
• Proven experience as an Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, or Distinguished Engineer in large-scale technology environments.
• Deep expertise designing highly scalable distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience building architecture strategies for global platforms handling high-volume transaction workloads.
• Strong background in microservices architectures, APIs, and event-driven systems.
• Experience operating in complex regulated industries such as fintech, payments, or financial services.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering organizations and drive architectural standards across distributed teams.
• Strong collaboration skills with the ability to partner across engineering, product, and executive leadership.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to represent and advocate Technology matters across the company and including C suite.
• Experience leading architecture initiatives within global engineering organizations.
• Open to Chicago, IL or Austin, TX

Submit today and get started!

We are excited to get to know you! Throughout our process you can expect to meet different FlyMates including the Hiring Manager and other Flymates. Your Talent Acquisition Partner will walk you through the steps and be your “go-to” person for questions.

Flywire is an equal opportunity employer and follows a policy of administering all employment decisions and personnel actions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, gender identity, national origin, age, ancestry, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, genetic disposition or carrier status, veteran status, or any other category protected under applicable national, federal, state or local law.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $245,000-$295,000 plus bonus, and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, position level, and location. The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and several other factors, including job-related skills, experience, relevant education and training.