Senior Solution Architect

Job Title: Senior Solution Architect  
Location: Bristol  
Salary: £78,810 - £106,400
Hours:  Full time
Working Pattern: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in office.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you!

About this opportunity

Become a part of Commercial Lending as a Senior Solution Architect and seize a unique chance to influence the future of digital banking. Our mission to build a bank of the future is driven by our extensive transformation programme. This role offers you the opportunity to work on ambitious projects within our Commercial Lending Platform, focusing on delivering exceptional digital journeys for our clients. If you're passionate about customer success, innovation, and leading transformative technology initiatives, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Help us enhance customer experiences for our Commercial Cards clients. You'll play a key role in delivering reliable, scalable, and feature-packed software solutions. Make a real impact on millions of lives through our well-known brands like Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and Lloyds Bank.

This is a time of growth for the platform. We're passionate about building a Diverse, collaborative, empowered and skilled team. We're on the journey to simplify and modernise our tech stack and innovate using new technologies. We're keen to move towards our target state with a cloud first (private and public) approach in our hosting strategy and to transform our systems from monolith to microservices whilst decommissioning our legacy estate.

What you’ll do

• Collaborating with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Enterprise Architects & Engineers to create the Architectural runway for our Platform teams. Once baselined, our Solution Architects continuously invest in maintaining the Architecture runway underpinning our Platform teams.

• Partner with Enterprise Architecture & service providers to elaborate on solutions, their interfaces and validating technology assumptions, evaluating implementation alternatives and software lifecycle risks, assumptions, issues & dependencies.

• Providing analysis of options and deliver end-to-end solution designs using relevant architectural building blocks as well as producing designs for features that enable frequent incremental customer value delivery.

• Owning the technical design risks or issues and driving resolution through architectural or agile practises.

• Leveraging industry best practise, frameworks, standards & policies in creating opportunities & value for our customers.

• Contributing to the financial investment process to obtain funding for key solution opportunities.

• Setting guiding principles and solution success criteria for platform capability or feature development across our Platforms.

• Providing oversight & foster built in quality, decoupled & modernised architectures.

• Supporting Product Owners & Platform Leads in identifying, articulating and impact assessing software & infrastructure currency risks or issues, offering options & recommendations on action planning & continuously evergreening solutions/systems within the Platform.

• As a Senior Solution Architect, you'll also hold overall responsibility for leading and directing a diverse workforce to achieve the business strategy, Inspiring people, achieving their full commitment to do the extraordinary.

What you’ll need

• Have experiences in systems engineering or solution architecture with appreciation of software development processes such as Behaviour Driven Development & Test Driven Development.

• Have understanding & experiences in applying different project, architecture, life cycling and risk management methods to bring in customer value.

• Demonstrate strong understanding of solution & software architecture patterns.

• Have experience in defining and/or operating environments embracing Agile Architecture, Emergent & Intentional architecture techniques.

• Experience of systems or solutions development, change lifecycle, release management at web-scale.

• Experience in partnering & collaborating with Enterprise, Security, Data & Infrastructure architects to create customer value or tackle business problems.

• Proficient & demonstrable experience in leading activities associated to Architectural Governance, Risk Management or Compliance processes.

• Familiarity of Architectural Frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, Cloud Architectures or similar.

• Have an ability to understand how and where third party products could be deployed, including solid understanding of vendor evaluation and selection processes & best practises.

• Prior experience in Mobile native, Cross platform/Hybrid App, API Gateway Management and microservices domain.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in/all its forms.

We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%.

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance.

• Share schemes including free shares.

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top.

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow and thrive? Apply today and find out more!