Lead Architect - 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, managing a team of 3-4 other Architects
• Remain hands-on and technically credible
• Be responsible for shaping the architectural blueprint across the business, defining governance, tooling, standards, and long-term target state architecture
• Bring Applied AI into the systems of the business to automate internal or customer-facing solutions
• Influence both executive-level technology direction and the reality of engineering delivery teams
• Drive architectural governance and technical direction
• Bring strong cloud-native and distributed systems experience
• Understand modern B2C digital products, subscriptions, e-commerce, or app-led businesses

What they’re looking for:

• Strong Lead Architecture background within scaled digital businesses
• Experience building or evolving architecture functions
• Deep Microsoft Azure OR AWS architecture experience (They use Azure: 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:

• Re-platforming from monolithic systems into event-driven microservices
• Large-scale backend and distributed systems challenges
• Building toward domain-driven architecture and greater engineering autonomy
• Stripe payments transformation
• Major data platform evolution into Microsoft Fabric
• A strategic mobile app rebuild likely centred around React Native
• Strong interest in AI-enabled products, DevEx, and applied AI capabilities

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.