Principal Architect Financial Crimes Risk Management Technology

In an era where financial crimes grow more sophisticated by the day, Wells Fargo is seeking a visionary Principal Architect to redefine how a global institution detects, prevents, and responds to emerging threats. This is not merely an architecture role-it is a mission-critical opportunity to shape the future of Financial Crimes Risk Management at enterprise scale.
As the strategic force behind our next-generation Financial Crimes Risk Management FCRM ecosystem, you will architect the platforms, data foundations, and AI-driven capabilities that safeguard millions of customers, uphold regulatory integrity, and enable the bank to stay steps ahead of adversaries.
As the senior technical and domain authority, you will set the blueprint for our target-state architecture across AML, Sanctions, KYC, Fraud, and investigative platforms-ensuring resilience, intelligence, and regulatory confidence in every component. You will partner directly with Business Domain leaders, data science innovators, and engineering teams to drive modernization at a scale few organizations can match. From advanced entity resolution and network analytics to GenAI-assisted investigations and next-gen transaction monitoring, you will guide the creation of capabilities that transform how a global financial institution combats financial crime.
This is a leadership Individual Contributor role for those who combine deep domain expertise with cutting-edge technical mastery-and who thrive at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and enterprise-wide influence. If you want to build systems that matter, shape the roadmap for AI in financial crime, and lead an architectural vision with real-world impact, this is the moment to step in.
Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain the target-state architecture for Financial Crimes, including data, analytics, workflow, screening, case management, and AI/ML components.
• Develop multi-year architectural roadmaps aligned with enterprise strategies and regulatory expectations.
• Drive architecture for the modernization of FCRM platforms (e.g., AML solutions, sanctions screening engines, fraud detection, customer risk rating systems, and typology models).
• Ensure architectural alignment with broader Risk, Finance, and Data target-state strategies.
• Architect AI/ML-enabled Financial Crimes Risk Management (FCRM) capabilities, including:
  • Intelligent alerting, typology detection, behavior modeling
  • GenAI-assisted investigations and SAR drafting
  • Advanced entity resolution, network analytics, anomaly detection
  • Drive integration of modern vector search, embeddings, and LLM-based pattern analysis into Financial Crimes Risk Management (FCRM ) workflows where appropriate.

• Serve as the architectural authority and thought leader for AML, Sanctions, Fraud, and KYC domains.
• Ensure architectural decisions meet regulatory requirements (e.g., FFIEC, FinCEN, OFAC, OCC/FRB expectations).
• Architect end-to-end data pipelines supporting Financial Crimes Risk Management (FCRM) , including ingestion, quality, lineage, entity resolution, and feature stores.
• Define standards for real-time streaming, batch ETL, and API-based data flows across the ecosystem.
• Drive architectural consistency across transaction monitoring, screening, and investigative platforms.
• Evaluate best-of-breed and next-gen AML/Fraud platforms, case management tools, and AI engines.
• Provide architectural oversight and guidance to engineering teams during design and implementation.
• Establish patterns, reusable components, and APIs to accelerate delivery and reduce technical debt.
• Act as an advisor to senior leadership to develop the architectural framework & delivery for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple groups.
• Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique challenges requiring in-depth evaluation across multiple areas or the enterprise, delivering solutions that are long-term, large-scale and require vision, creativity, innovation, advanced analytical and inductive thinking.
• Provide vision, direction and expertise to senior leadership on implementing the transformation strategy describing the current state, target state and transition architecture.
• Strategically engage with all levels of professionals and managers across the enterprise and serve as an architectural domain expert advisor to leadership.
• Ensure applications adhere to established Wells Fargo standards, policies, methodologies and industry best practices as it transforms toward target state architecture.
• Drive the definition, establishment, selection of strategic tools, and application of architecture frameworks.
• Maintain knowledge of industry best practices and new technologies and recommends innovations that enhance operations or provide a competitive advantage to the organization and can influence internal and vendor roadmaps in a significant capacity.

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of architecture experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education.
• 5+ years in AML, Sanctions, Fraud, or broader FinCrimes technology architecture.
• 3+ Years of Hands-on Architecture expertise utilizing Modern Tech Stacks such as API, Microservices Based Architecture and Data Platforms such as Python, Spark, Object Store etc.

Desired Qualifications:
Domain Expertise: 7+ years in AML, Sanctions, Fraud, or broader Financial Crimes Risk Management (FCRM) technology architecture with deep understanding of:

• Transaction monitoring systems.
• Watchlist/sanctions screening technologies.
• KYC/CDD and customer risk scoring.
• AML typologies, behavioral modeling, and alerting systems.
• Case management and investigations workflow.
• Regulatory reporting processes (SAR, CTR).
• Experience with commercial AML and Sanctions solutions (e.g., Actimize, Firco, Quantexa, Oracle Mantas, FIS/Detica, SAS AML).

Leadership skills:

• Executive presence and strong influencing skills.
• Ability to lead large initiatives across federated organizations.
• Strong problem-solving, with a strategic and innovative mindset.

Technical Expectations: 10+ years in modern technologies.

• Deep understanding of distributed system design, resilience patterns, fault tolerance, and high-availability architectures for regulated workloads.

Expert-level architecture experience with cloud-native ecosystems (GCP preferred; AWS/Acure acceptable), including:

• Container orchestration (Kubernetes/AKS/EKS/GKE).
• Serverless compute, event-driven architectures, and microservices patterns.
• Secure API management frameworks (Apigee, Kong, Azure APIM).

Strong command of enterprise-scale data architecture, including:

• Data lake/lakehouse architectures (Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Synapse).
• Schema evolution, metadata management, lineage, and governance (Collibra, Purview).
• Domain-driven data modeling aligned with modern risk/governance needs.

Expert in streaming & real-time data pipelines, including technologies such as:

• Kafka, Pulsar, or Kinesis
• Real-time transaction monitoring ingestion and enrichment patterns.
• Complex event processing (CEP).
• Experience architecting feature stores and analytical data flows for AML/Fraud models.

Strong architectural understanding of applied AI in Financial Crimes, including:

• Entity behavior analytics, risk scoring, anomaly detection, network analytics.
• NLP/NLU for case narrative generation, SAR summarization, alert summarization.
• Graph ML, embeddings, vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Azure AI Search, Neo4j).

Experience defining AI system architecture including:

• Model training pipelines, MLOps, and feature engineering.
• Operationalizing ML and LLM-based models at scale.
• Responsible AI, model governance, explainability, and validation.
• Integration of LLMs into highly regulated investigative workflows.
• Ability to partner with Data Science teams to translate AML typologies and fraud patterns into ML and GenAI solutions.

Job Expectations:

• Be Humble: You're smart yet always interested in learning from others
• Work Transparently: You always deal in an honest, direct, and transparent way.
• Take Ownership: You embrace responsibility and find joy in having the answers
• Learn More: You regularly self-educate and improve your skill set.
• Show Gratitude: You show appreciation and respect to those you work with

Pay Range
Reflected is the base pay range offered for this position. Pay may vary depending on factors including but not limited to demonstrated examples of prior performance, skills, experience, or work location. Employees may also be eligible for incentive opportunities.
$159,000.00 - $305,000.00
Benefits
Wells Fargo provides eligible employees with a comprehensive set of benefits, many of which are listed below. Visit Benefits - Wells Fargo Jobs for an overview of the following benefit plans and programs offered to employees.

• Health benefits
• 401(k) Plan
• Paid time off
• Disability benefits
• Life insurance, critical illness insurance, and accident insurance
• Parental leave
• Critical caregiving leave
• Discounts and savings
• Commuter benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• Scholarships for dependent children
• Adoption reimbursement

Posting End Date:
3 Mar 2026
* Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
We Value Equal Opportunity
Wells Fargo is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic.
Employees support our focus on building strong customer relationships balanced with a strong risk mitigating and compliance-driven culture which firmly establishes those disciplines as critical to the success of our customers and company. They are accountable for execution of all applicable risk programs (Credit, Market, Financial Crimes, Operational, Regulatory Compliance), which includes effectively following and adhering to applicable Wells Fargo policies and procedures, appropriately fulfilling risk and compliance obligations, timely and effective escalation and remediation of issues, and making sound risk decisions. There is emphasis on proactive monitoring, governance, risk identification and escalation, as well as making sound risk decisions commensurate with the business unit's risk appetite and all risk and compliance program requirements.
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To request a medical accommodation during the application or interview process, visit Disability Inclusion at Wells Fargo .
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