Lead Solution Architect

JOB TITLE: Lead Solution Architect

SALARY: £90,440 - £106,400

LOCATION: Manchester

HOURS:  Full time  

WORKING PATTERN: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in our Manchester office. 

About this opportunity…

We provide the digital tools and applications which support thousands of colleagues and millions of customer interactions every day. We’re looking for a hands-on Lead Solutions Architect to join our Colleague Desktop Lab, leading a diverse team to build and improve our critical platforms.

You’ll lead Lab initiatives to design, and deliver secure, scalable applications crucial for colleagues and customers.

We’re on an exciting journey to transform, investing in innovative technologies and platforms, agile ways of working, and modern technology architectures and patterns. We're seeking curious and passionate technologists who excel at solving real-world problems to make a meaningful impact. Come and build the future with us!

About us…

We’re on an exciting journey and there couldn’t be a better time to join us. The investments we’re making in our people, data, and technology are leading to innovative projects, fresh possibilities, and countless new ways for our people to work, learn, and thrive.

What you’ll do…

Lead the development of modern Solution Architectures for our platforms with Product Owners, Software Engineers, and collaborators. You’ll have a track record in, and passion for, delivering balanced Solution Architectures which meet complex customer needs. You’ll thrive in the design and delivery of large scale, important solutions. You’ll lead through ambiguity to structured and well-reasoned conclusions, balancing trade-offs effectively and dealing with competing and overlapping needs from multiple collaborators. Bring to bear your technology passion and learning excitement to craft architectures within enterprise context, collaborate with engineers, champion design intent, and gather real-world feedback.

What you’ll need…

• Technical Proficiency: Deep understanding of various technologies, including cloud services, modern application architectures, cybersecurity, and new technologies like AI.

• Systems Thinking and Architectural Craft: Ability to understand and model complex systems, recognize patterns, and craft scalable, secure and robust architectures.

• Lead/ mentor other architects and engineers in software, data, and architecture fields.

• Design and Implementation Patterns: Familiarity with multiple design and implementation patterns.

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate with collaborators, explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences, and lead teams.

• Strong delivery leadership skills to guide teams, make strategic decisions, and drive projects to completion.

• Identifies shortcomings, suggests improvements and implements approved revisions to current compliance processes, systems and procedures within assigned unit and/or field.

• Makes a significant improvement on short-term or long-term business performance by recommending authoritative technical and/or professional solutions.

• Manages various team activities, ensures regulatory compliance, liaises with internal risk management, supports compliance policy.

It would be great if you had any of the following…

• Hands on experience with infrastructure as code such as Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible

• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines to deliver changes incrementally to production

• Exposure and/or Experience with cloud technologies Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or others (AWS, ICP/OCP, Azure)

• Containers, Orchestration, and Service Mesh: Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, etc.

• Experience with DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering

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 

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