Lead Architect (Azure) - Up to £130k

Lead Architect (Hands-on Manager)

📍 Hybrid, London (3 days in office, South London)

💰 £110,000 - £130,000 + bonus + benefits

We're partnered with one of the UK’s leading fitness brands on a newly created Lead Architect hire, as they build out an Architecture team function internally

This isn’t a “maintain the estate” architecture role. They’re in the middle of a major technology transformation across customer platforms, memberships, integrations and mobile experience, all within a business serving close to 1 million active users across 250+ physical locations nationwide

The scale is genuinely interesting:

• High-volume customer journeys
• Mobile-first member experiences
• Real-time integrations with third-party platforms and connected devices
• Operational telemetry and monitoring systems
• Future-facing work around AI

Reporting directly to the CTO, you will operate strategically at an enterprise level directly managing a team of 3-5 other Architects, whilst still being technically credible and hands-on

You’d be responsible for shaping the architectural blueprint across the business, defining governance, tooling, standards and long-term target state architecture, whilst also leading a team of Architects, Analysts and Solution Designers

They want someone capable of influencing both executive-level technology direction and the reality of engineering delivery teams

What they’re looking for:

• Strong Lead / Enterprise Architecture background within scaled digital businesses
• Experience building or evolving architecture functions
• Deep Microsoft Azure architecture experience (AKS, App Services, Event Hubs, API Management etc.)
• Strong distributed systems and cloud-native architecture knowledge
• Experience designing high-availability, event-driven systems
• Ability to operate across business, engineering and product stakeholders
• Previous people leadership experience
• Awareness of modern architecture patterns: DDD, Event-driven systems, CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture, Microservices
• Proven experience in driving AI into workflows, teams, and systems
• Understanding of observability, security and compliance considerations
• Ideally some exposure to mobile / customer-facing platforms

The environment itself is modern and ambitious without being overly corporate.

They’ve invested heavily into technology over the last 2 years, particularly across app and customer experience, and this role will play a major part in defining what the future technology organisation looks like.