Lead Solution Architect - Intelligent Automation

JOB TITLE: Lead Solution Architect

SALARY: £90,440 - £106,400

LOCATION(S): Manchester

HOURS: Full-time – 35 hours per week

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

About this opportunity

This exciting opportunity is within our Intelligent Process Automation lab within the Analytics & AI platform for a Lead Solution Architect. As a Lead Solution Architect, you have responsibility for the following

You’ll lead, direct and shape approaches to solving technical challenges and translating business requirements into technical solutions.

You’ll 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.

You’ll be a core contributor to ensure good quality and engineering practices are followed in accordance with engineering transformation strategy.

An ideal Lead Solution Architect will be able to display broad and deep technical experience with a passion for engineering excellence. We’re looking for dynamic 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.

What you’ll do 

• Collaborate with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Enterprise Architects & Engineers to create the Architectural runway for your lab

• Be responsible for our application architecture and the delivery of our engineering design deliverables and managing architecture decisions through formal governance processes

• Manage the IT Roadmap, driving best practice 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.

• Promote adaptive design practises to drive collaboration across Platform teams centring on a common vision with continuous feedback.

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

What you’ll need

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

• Strong knowledge 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 leading architecture and design governance

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

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

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

It would be great if you also had

• Experience in the banking and finance industry.

• Experience with Process Automation

• Preferable experience with Python and Big Data technologies including ML

• Exposure to open-source technologies and frameworks

• Experience in agile / iterative design working practices

• Knowledge of AI

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, and build 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 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

If you’re excited by the thought of becoming part of our team, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.