Architect

About us:

Luno is the crypto investment app you can rely on, enabling you to buy, store and explore crypto securely. We’re committed to putting the power of cryptocurrency in everyone's hands sensibly and responsibly.

Since 2013, we’ve helped millions of people around the world invest safely in crypto. We do this by cutting through the hype and supporting customers at every step of the way. All products and cryptocurrencies on our platform must first meet stringent legal, risk and technical security standards. We don’t do memecoins.

Transparency is key for us. Luno stores all crypto on a 1:1 basis and we have rigorous processes in place so you can be confident your investment is secure. We’re available in more than 40 countries around the world and we work closely with respective regulators in all of these markets to be fully compliant, as we believe this is the best way to help everyone, everywhere, invest safely.

About the team:

You'll join Luno's Architecture team, a small group of architects who each own the architecture across Luno's business portfolios, alongside specialists in data and blockchain architecture. It's a close-knit community: architects review each other's work, share standards and patterns, and keep Luno's platform coherent as a whole.

You'll be embedded in the Payments & OTC portfolio, the teams that move money in and out of Luno: fiat payment and banking integrations across more than 40 countries, payment orchestration, settlement infrastructure, and the OTC desk that serves our largest customers. The portfolio is backend-heavy and integration-rich, spanning banks, payment providers and partner platforms, but its products surface directly in Luno's consumer and institutional web and mobile apps, so the architecture runs the full stack, all in a regulated environment.

The role in a nutshell:

You own the system architecture of the portfolio. You work as a standing peer alongside its engineering and product leadership, accountable for architectural integrity across its systems: "is it designed right, and does it fit Luno?"

This is not a coding role; its value lies in altitude and breadth, holding the architectural view across many teams and systems at once. You work through design artefacts, review and influence rather than mandate. You'll still build the occasional proof of concept, and you stay close enough to the codebase to be credible across the stack, but delivery belongs to the teams.

Your mission will be:

• Own the architectural view of the portfolio: a clear, current map of its systems, contracts and domain models that teams actually use
• Author high-level designs for new capabilities, and review and sign off the technical designs teams produce, guiding through questions and evidence rather than verdicts
• Record consequential decisions and their rationale so they're made once and stay discoverable
• Partner deeply with product and engineering leadership: shape scope and sequencing early, and translate in both directions between product intent and architectural constraint
• Partner with commercial teams: solution architecture for bank, payment provider and partner integrations, and technical credibility in sales and vendor conversations
• Drive our payment orchestration and settlement architecture: shape how an orchestration layer works alongside dozens of existing provider integrations, set the patterns that make new payment integrations repeatable rather than bespoke, and guide how the OTC desk integrates with Luno's brokerage and liquidity infrastructure
• Guide the client-side architecture of the portfolio's payment experiences as our apps migrate onto a new Flutter-based mobile architecture, keeping payment flows coherent from tap to settlement
• Design for the regulated context: compliance, security and data protection are design inputs, not afterthoughts
• Champion AI adoption: use AI tooling in your own design work, help teams apply it well, and shape where AI-assisted capabilities belong in the products we build
• Connect the portfolio to Luno's wider architecture community: bring standards and golden paths in, carry friction back out, and keep your decisions coherent with the rest of the platform

A little about you:

• You've architected consumer-facing, high-scale distributed systems; your recent leverage has come from design, writing and influence rather than commits. Financial services experience is advantageous.
• You're comfortable this isn't a coding role: you can still build a proof of concept, and you read code well enough to understand a system across the stack, from clients to backend services and data
• You write and communicate exceptionally well, and bring structure to ambiguity
• You influence without authority, and know when to let a team diverge and simply document the trade-off
• You are experienced in backend architecture: you're fluent in the trade-offs of event-driven architecture, microservices, API and domain modelling, and at least one major cloud provider (ideally AWS)
• You've worked with payment systems: payment providers, orchestration, settlement and reconciliation, and the realities of integrating with banks and partners across many markets. OTC or trading systems experience is a plus.
• You're credible across web and mobile client architecture too, and can guide teams building rich client experiences on top of a complex backend (Flutter experience is a plus)
• Previous experience as a software engineer in a modern language, with strong product sense
• You've worked in regulated markets, or design with compliance, security and data protection as first-class constraints
• You use AI tools as a working instrument, with sound judgment about their limits, and you're excited to help an organisation adopt them well
• You can translate architecture for product, compliance, commercial and executive audiences, including across the table from a bank, partner or customer's technical team
• BSc in Computer Science or another technical discipline, or equivalent working experience

Don't be put off if you don't tick all of the boxes; they're a guide based on what we'd love to see, but we appreciate that excellent architects have diverse backgrounds.

Life at Luno:

• Remote but reachable work policy gives you the freedom to choose between working from home or the office.
• Plus the option to buy and sell up to 5 days leave
• Improve body and mind, with excellent private medical insurance
• Enjoy peace of mind with Luno's comprehensive retirement fund and essential risk benefits.
• Access to Learnably and our additional learning platforms for your personal and professional development
• 6 months primary care-giver leave
• Paw-ternity leave for your furry friend
• Annual Inspiration Day in addition to your annual leave which increases based on your length of service! 
• A collaborative, friendly work community, with regular social events and virtual cooking, dancing, drawing and house planting classes hosted by our Lunauts
• Free lunch and snacks
• 0 fees up to a certain amount with Luno from the day you start.*

*Offer only available on Luno Instant Buy, not Luno Exchange

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.