Solution Architect

Job Title: Solution Architect
Salary: £70,929 –78,810
Location: Bristol
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 Bristol office.

About us

Lloyds Banking Group is the UK’s biggest Retail, Digital and Mobile bank with over 30 million customers and a big responsibility to help Britain Prosper. We’re in the middle of a £3bn investment into our People, Platforms and Data as part of our strategy to build the Bank of the Future and grow sustainably.

About this opportunity

Become a part of Commercial Lending as a 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.

About the role:

Whoever joins the team will play critical role in crafting solutions that can provide continuous flow and will be responsible for:

• 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.

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

• Participating in Agile ceremonies, elicit requirements, shape & validate designs or prototypes that deliver customer outcomes that align to our target architecture.

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

• Contributing to the financial investment process to acquire 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.

What we need from you:

We need a Solution Architect who understands the challenges of modern architecture and builds a compelling strategic vision and will understand a wide array of technology implications including people and process, bringing this to your integrated view of design.

Experience we’re looking for:

• Are experienced working in multi-disciplinary product, feature or platform teams.

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

• Worked with collaborators to influence their thinking about what is possible through technology innovation.

• 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

Want to do amazing work, that’s interesting and makes a difference to millions of people? Join our journey.