Senior Solutions Architect
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.