Technical Architect – AI \| Role Description

Work collaboratively with different areas of the Bank to design robust architectures capable of meeting functional and non-functional requirements, including technology, security, performance, resilience, scalability, integration, and observability.

Assess technical feasibility and produce solution designs in response to business needs, in close alignment with Santander CTO team guidelines, Bank policies, and Group Architecture principles.

Lead the end-to-end design of AI solutions, including ingestion, transformation, storage, serving, consumption, application integration, and operationalization components.

Define architectures for analytical, predictive, generative, and intelligent automation use cases, ensuring technological suitability and long-term sustainability of the solution.

Ensure that proposed solutions incorporate security by design, privacy by design, resilience by design, and operability by design principles.

Promote the adoption of architectural standards, reusable components, reference frameworks, and best practices in software, data, and AI engineering.

Participate in defining technology modernization strategies, integration with legacy systems, and evolution of the Bank’s data and AI platforms.

Work with cross-functional teams, including IT Development, CIO, CISO, CTO, Operations, and Business units, towards a common objective.

Support technology decision-making by analyzing trade-offs between cost, complexity, risk, time-to-market, and future evolution capability.

Ensure technical designs support deployment across cloud, hybrid, and on‑premises environments in accordance with corporate standards.

Continuously identify opportunities to improve, simplify, and rationalize the Bank’s technical solutions, respecting the Group’s technology stack.

Stay up to date with trends, solutions, and emerging technologies in Data, AI, GenAI, and distributed platforms, proposing their adoption when aligned with Bank and Corporate policies.

Promote teamwork, cross-domain collaboration, and an agile culture in software and data solution development.

Mandatory Requirements

• Proven experience of more than 5 years in Technical Architecture roles; experience specifically in AI is highly valued.
• Strong experience designing architectures for enterprise-scale solutions, with a solid understanding of architecture principles, patterns, and frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with multiple stakeholders to define solutions aligned with business needs and technological, regulatory, and operational constraints.
• Proven ability to work with cloud and hybrid architectures, namely Azure, AWS, and private cloud (OHE).
• Strong knowledge of AI/ML and GenAI architectures, including frameworks, integration patterns, pipeline orchestration, vector stores, RAG, model serving, guardrails, and model observability.
• Experience designing solutions integrated with enterprise AI services, such as Azure OpenAI or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with integration patterns and distributed systems, including APIs, events, microservices, asynchronous processing, and cross-domain integrations.
• Experience working in Agile delivery environments, collaborating with multidisciplinary teams and supporting incremental deliveries.
• Experience integrating and/or modernizing legacy systems.
• Ability to assess existing solutions and proactively identify opportunities for improvement, simplification, and rationalization.
• Strong technical knowledge of relevant languages and ecosystems, such as Python, SQL, Java/Spring, JavaScript, among others.
• Knowledge of modern engineering practices, including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automation, observability, testing, versioning, and controlled deployments.
• Ability to actively collaborate across multiple simultaneous projects with competing priorities and teams.
• Excellent communication skills in English. Knowledge of Spanish is a plus.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

Additional Requirements Valued for an AI Specialist

• Experience designing enterprise AI platforms.
• Experience with MLOps / LLMOps patterns, including model lifecycle management, environment promotion, evaluation, monitoring, versioning, and drift control.
• Knowledge of AI governance practices, including explainability, auditability, observability, risk control, prompt security, filtering, guardrails, and hallucination management.
• Experience designing solutions using RAG, embeddings, semantic search, vector databases, and integration between LLMs and enterprise knowledge.
• Knowledge of secrets management, environment segregation, technical identity, authentication/authorization, and secure integration with corporate platforms.
• Familiarity with architectural and security requirements in banking or regulated environments.
• Experience defining technology evolution roadmaps and architectural standards for Data & AI domains.
• Experience and knowledge of the Noxus platform is a plus.

Personal Skills

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong analytical skills and problem-solving orientation.
• High level of critical thinking, attention to detail, and technical rigor.
• Ability to influence and facilitate collaboration between teams with different perspectives and priorities.
• Collaborative, proactive profile with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Strong organization, planning, and time management skills.
• Ability to balance deadlines, competing priorities, and cross-dependencies.
• Strong focus on solution quality, resilience, and long-term sustainability.

Additional Valued Experience

• Previous experience in the banking sector or highly regulated environments.
• Participation in technology transformation initiatives, application modernization, or industrialization of AI platforms.
• Experience producing and reviewing technical designs, architectural standards, principles, and governance documentation.
• Ability to act as a technical reference and support delivery teams in implementing the defined architectures.

What can you expect from us?

Mind-blowing workplace culture. You will be integrated in a professional, dynamic and collaborative team.

100% Remote opportunities

We want you to have the flexibility to work where you feel most comfortable and productive.

International Career

• You can expect professional growth and to be connect with the world.
• We are represented in Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark.
• And with projects in many other countries: Netherlands, Luxembourg, Singapore and in the United States of America (and a lot more is coming…)

Extra Benefits & Perks

If you wish to work with us and you are outside European Union (good news…) we are a Tech Visa Company, We will help!

As a plus, we provide Health and Life Insurance.