Senior Solution Architect - Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Solutions

Senior Solution Architect - Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Solutions

Location: Remote/As per business needs
Contract: Contract
Rate: £300/day - Inside IR35
Eligibility: Minimum 5 years of continuous UK residency
CV Eligibility: UK Citizens only

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Senior Solution Architect to design and deliver Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product solutions that support the transformation of electricity networks and contribute to the journey towards Net Zero.

The successful candidate will work across Corporate Services, translating business requirements into scalable, secure and compliant solution architectures while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture strategy, governance and technology standards.

Key ResponsibilitiesSolution Architecture & Design

• Develop high-level and detailed solution architectures for COTS products and SaaS/cloud solutions.

• Design High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies.

• Produce and maintain architecture documentation, diagrams and technical artefacts.

• Document key architectural decisions and present conceptual solutions to stakeholders and governance forums.

• Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, resilient and aligned with enterprise architecture principles.

Technical Leadership

• Gather, analyse and validate functional and non-functional requirements.

• Assess requirements relating to performance, scalability, availability, security and resilience.

• Identify opportunities to optimise COTS solutions while working within the product's standard configuration and capabilities.

• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance to delivery and product teams.

Cloud, Data & Integration Architecture

• Develop cloud adoption strategies, roadmaps and reusable architecture patterns.

• Design and oversee integration between enterprise applications, cloud platforms and data services.

• Demonstrate strong understanding of:

  • Snowflake

  • Data Fabric

  • Data Lakes

  • Databricks

  • ETL/ELT pipelines

• Support architectures enabling advanced data modelling, simulation, correlation and visualisation.

Ways of Working

• Experience working within Agile and Kanban delivery environments.

• Comfortable working within a Product/Value Stream methodology.

• Understanding of DevOps, CI/CD and GitHub workflows.

• Experience with Value Stream Architecture and Process-Driven Architecture.

• Ability to collaborate effectively across architecture, engineering, product, data and business teams
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Required Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a Senior Solution Architect/Solution Architect in complex enterprise environments.

• Strong experience designing and implementing COTS, SaaS and cloud solutions.

• Strong understanding of solution architecture, integration architecture and enterprise architecture principles.

• Experience designing HA, DR, resilience and security architectures.

• Strong knowledge of cloud adoption and cloud architecture patterns.

• Hands-on architectural understanding of Snowflake, Data Fabric, Data Lake, Databricks and ETL/ELT.

• Good understanding of network architectures and network components.

• Experience with architecture governance, standards and technical documentation.

• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.

• Ability to translate complex business requirements into practical technical solutions.

• Knowledge of data controls, data governance and relevant industry benchmarks.

• Understanding of DevOps, CI/CD and GitHub.

• Experience working in Agile/Kanban and product-oriented environments.