Solutions Architect

JOB TITLE: Solutions Architect – Colleague Channels Platform

SALARY: £70,929 - £78,810

LOCATION(S): Manchester

HOURS: [Full-time]

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week currently, or 40% of our time, at our Manchester office.

About this opportunity…

In Smarter Journeys Lab, we’re on an exciting mission to build re-usable colleague and customer solutions that are highly intuitive and automated, underpinned by a modern infrastructure which enables a highly flexible and responsive workforce. This will provide customers with a choice of channels that are consistent, easy to access and navigate between.

This excellent opportunity is for a Solution Architect to:

• Direct and shape approaches to solving technical challenges and translating business requirements into technical solutions.

• Work in a highly collaborative way to drive efforts to create, build, support and improve our software working closely with the product and engineering teams with lots of exciting new challenges.

• Be a core contributor to ensure good quality and engineering practices are followed in accordance with engineering transformation strategy.

You’ll need to be able to display broad and deep technical experience with a passion for engineering completion. We are looking for sophisticated and adaptable individual able to use and learn new skills. You’ll be curious about technology and understanding how things work and influence positively – demonstrating the right values and behaviours and encouraging this in team members.

About us…

Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you will too…

What you’ll do…

• Be responsible for our application architecture and the delivery of our engineering design work and handling architecture decisions through formal governance processes.

• Support the development of the IT Roadmap, driving standard methodology initiatives.

• Ensure IT compliance and governance policies are met.

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

• Provide 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.

• Assemble technical design risks or issues and drive resolution through architectural or agile practices.

What you’ll bring…

• Prior experience in a solution architecture position, strong experience of solution design, security and resilience patterns.

• Proven understanding of microservices, containerisation, cloud native and event-driven design concepts.

• Good knowledge of infrastructure and security architecture practices and concerns.

• Have played an active part in architecture and design governance.

• Cloud Platform as a Service or similar offerings – preferably GCP.

Desirable Skills…

• Experience in the banking and finance industry.

• Experience with Process Automation.

• Exposure to open-source technologies and frameworks.

• Experience in agile / iterative design working practices.

• Experience of API Gateways & Management Platforms such as IBM API Connect, IBM DataPower, Apigee, Microsoft Azure API Manager, or similar.

• Knowledge of container-based applications deployed using Kubernetes orchestration.

• Knowledge of AI including LLMs and Classifiers.

• Knowledge of Architectural Frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, Software patterns or similar.

About working for us…

Our focus is to ensure we are 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 is why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We are disability confident. So, if you would 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 performance-related bonus

• 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.

Join our journey.