Assistant Vice President Solutions Architect

Barclays; Glasgow; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays is seeking an Assistant Vice President Solutions Architect to shape the bank's target data architecture, modelling, and standards. You will lead data governance, collaborate with product, eng teams and governance forums, and help ensure data accuracy and security across environments.

You will work on cloud-enabled designs, data debt identification, and risk-based decision making while mentoring teams and driving initiatives aligned to business strategy.

Qualifications

• Experience or exposure to data architecture or enterprise data modelling in regulated environments.
• Support data product flows including sourcing, lineage and controls for quality.
• Identify data debt and architectural challenges; contribute to improvements with teams.
• Understand banking products, risk frameworks, regulatory data needs and markets data.
• Exposure to AWS and data lake technologies; ability to script for validation/automation.
• Familiarity with relational, columnar and NoSQL databases as listed.
• Strong communication and collaboration with product managers, engineering and governance.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop data solutions as products aligned with modern software practices.
• Apply cloud capabilities (elasticity, serverless, containerisation) to workloads.
• Incorporate security principles and ensure resiliency and governance standards.
• Balance risks and controls; deliver business and technology value.
• Adopt standardised solutions; feed evolution where gaps exist.
• Provide fault-finding and performance support to run/support teams.
• Prepare architecture inputs for governance processes including privacy and records management.

Skills

Data architecture

Enterprise data modelling

Data governance

Communication skills

Collaboration

Risk awareness

Tools

AWS

Lake Formation

Data Lake

Python

Shell

Oracle

SQL Server

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Redshift

Snowflake

MongoDB

Cassandra

Job description

Join us at Barclays as an Assistant Vice President Solutions architect, where you will support the design, evolution and governance of the bank’s target data architecture. This includes shared data environments, enterprise data models and data standards aligned to business strategy. In this role, you will contribute to ensuring data is accurate, secure, and accessible to meet the evolving needs of internal and external stakeholders.

To be successful as an Assistant Vice President Solutions architect, you should have experience with:

• Experience or exposure to data architecture or enterprise data modelling, ideally within financial services or a similar regulated environment.

• Supporting data product flows, including sourcing, lineage and control points to help improve data quality and consistency.

• Assisting in identifying technical data debt, architectural challenges, or control gaps and contributing to prioritised improvements with wider teams.

• A working understanding of banking products, risk frameworks, regulatory data requirements and financial markets data with a willingness to continue learning.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, including services like Lake Formation or Data Lake environments.

• Scripting skills (for example, Python or Shell) to support data validation, automation, or analysis.

• Familiarity with database systems, including relational (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL), columnar (Amazon Redshift, Snowflake), and/or NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra).

• Ample communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work with product managers, engineering teams, governance forums, and business stakeholders to understand requirements and support solution development.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role is based in Glasgow.

Purpose of the role

To design, develop, and implement solutions to complex business problems, collaborating with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements, and design and implement solutions that meet those needs and create solutions that balance technology risks against business delivery, driving consistency.

Accountabilities

• Design and development of solutions as products that can evolve, meeting business requirements that align with modern software engineering practices and automated delivery tooling. This includes identification and implementation of the technologies and platforms.
• Targeted design activities that apply an appropriate workload placement strategy and maximise the benefit of cloud capabilities such as elasticity, serverless, containerisation etc.
• Best practice designs incorporating security principles (such as defence in depth and reduction of blast radius) that meet the Bank’s resiliency expectations.
• Solutions that appropriately balance risks and controls to deliver the agreed business and technology value.
• Adoption of standardised solutions where they fit. If no standard solutions fit, feed into their ongoing evolution where appropriate.
• Fault finding and performance issues support to operational support teams, leveraging available tooling.
• Solution design impact assessment in terms of risk, capacity and cost impact, inc. estimation of project change and ongoing run costs.
• Development of the requisite architecture inputs required to comply with the banks governance processes, including design artefacts required for architecture, privacy, security and records management governance processes.

Assistant Vice President Expectations

• To advise and influence decision making, contribute to policy development and take responsibility for operational effectiveness. Collaborate closely with other functions/ business divisions.
• Lead a team performing complex tasks, using well developed professional knowledge and skills to deliver on work that impacts the whole business function. Set objectives and coach employees in pursuit of those objectives, appraisal of performance relative to objectives and determination of reward outcomes
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will lead collaborative assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will identify new directions for assignments and/ or projects, identifying a combination of cross functional methodologies or practices to meet required outcomes.
• Consult on complex issues; providing advice to People Leaders to support the resolution of escalated issues.
• Identify ways to mitigate risk and developing new policies/procedures in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Take ownership for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work done.
• Perform work that is closely related to that of other areas, which requires understanding of how areas coordinate and contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the organisation sub-function.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategy.
• Engage in complex analysis of data from multiple sources of information, internal and external sources such as procedures and practises (in other areas, teams, companies, etc).to solve problems creatively and effectively.
• Communicate complex information. 'Complex' information could include sensitive information or information that is difficult to communicate because of its content or its audience.
• Influence or convince stakeholders to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.