Senior Solutions Architect
8 days ago
Nottingham
Lead Solutions Architect Bristol / Edinburgh / Leeds (Hybrid – 2 days per week in the office) A leading financial services organisation is seeking a Lead Solutions Architect to play a critical role in shaping the architecture behind large-scale digital transformation initiatives. This position sits at the heart of a major platform responsible for delivering colleague and customer services across insurance, pensions, and investment products. This is not a maintenance-focused architecture role. It is an opportunity to define architectural direction, modernise legacy capability, and help build scalable, intelligent platforms that support the organisation’s long-term digital strategy. You will work closely with Product Owners, Engineering teams, and Enterprise Architecture to design and deliver complex, high-impact solutions across a distributed engineering landscape spanning the UK and international teams. Key Responsibilities • Define and lead target solution architectures across APIs, microservices, colleague platforms, CCaaS telephony, robotics, and AI-enabled automation, • Drive the modernisation and simplification of service-driven architectures, enabling scalable and resilient digital platforms, • Shape the data strategy to support actionable intelligence and improved decision-making at scale, • Guide engineering teams in implementing secure, reliable, and scalable architectures, • Work across multiple feature teams to balance delivery speed with long-term architectural strategy, • Support the transformation of back-office operations and customer service capabilities through modern technology and automation, • Collaborate with architecture and engineering leadership to establish standards, patterns, and best practices Key Experience Required • Proven experience leading architecture across complex, multi-system transformation programmes, • Deep knowledge of API-led architectures and microservices, including event-driven and publish/subscribe patterns, • Strong understanding of web architecture, security, and scalable distributed systems, • Experience designing systems with authentication, single sign-on (OAuth), and encryption (in transit and at rest), • Demonstrated ability to define architectural standards, frameworks, and patterns, • Strong stakeholder engagement skills with the ability to influence engineering and product teams Desirable Experience • Cloud platform experience (GCP preferred, though Azure or AWS is also valuable), • Experience with contact centre / CCaaS platforms such as Genesys Cloud, NICE, or AWS, • Leadership or mentoring of other architects, • Experience experimenting or prototyping new approaches across different technology stacks, • Familiarity with content management frameworks and digital experience tooling Working Environment • Hybrid working model with two days per week in the office, • Locations available in Bristol, Edinburgh, or Leeds, • Agile and flexible working options, including hybrid arrangements and job share opportunities Benefits • Generous pension contribution of up to 15%, • Annual performance bonus, • Share schemes including free shares, • 30 days holiday plus bank holidays, • Flexible lifestyle benefits and wellbeing initiatives, • Strong parental leave policies and family support programmes This role offers the opportunity to work on high-impact digital transformation programmes, influence architectural strategy across large platforms, and help shape the future technology landscape of a major financial services organisation. If you would like to learn more, please apply or reach out for a confidential discussion.