Lead Solution Architect

Barclays; Glasgow; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services company in Glasgow is seeking a Lead Solution Architect to design, develop, and implement solutions for complex business challenges. The ideal candidate should have demonstrated experience in solution architecture, managing senior teams, and expertise in data platforms like Snowflake and AWS. This role emphasizes building secure, scalable solutions to enhance data insights and product delivery, requiring strong leadership and collaboration skills. Competitive compensation and a dynamic working environment are offered.

Qualifications

• Experience as a solution architect overseeing team performance.
• Ability to manage a team of senior solution architects.
• Proficiency in data warehousing, data lakes, and cloud data services.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement solutions for complex business problems.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to meet business requirements.
• Develop strategies for effective cloud capability utilization.

Skills

Solution architecture experience

Team management

Data warehousing and querying skills

Machine learning frameworks

ETL process development

Understanding of data protection regulations

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Join us as a Lead Solution Architect, where you’ll help shape and deliver data-driven solutions that support how we work and serve our clients. This role sits within the Corporate Architecture team and offers the chance to contribute to meaningful improvements in data innovation, data platforms and designing products & services that meet real customer needs. You’ll work closely with people across different teams to create secure, scalable solutions that support data insights, smooth operations, and better data products to meet consumer needs.

To succeed in this role, you’ll bring experience and skills such as:

• Demonstrated experience as a solution architect, including overseeing team performance and guiding technical delivery.
• Capability to manage a team of 10 Senior Solution Architects
• Working with data warehousing, data lakes, data mesh, and platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and cloud-based data services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Using machine learning frameworks, building models, and working with AI, business intelligence tools, and data visualisation platforms.
• Building and guiding ETL processes, data pipelines, and streaming systems, with a focus on data quality, metadata, and security.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Understanding data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and how to handle personal and sensitive data responsibly.
• Knowing how data is used in the Global Transaction Banking space.
• Supporting decentralised, team-led approaches to working with data.

You may be assessed on skills that help you succeed in this role, such as awareness of risk and governance, adapting to change, understanding business needs, solving problems, and working with digital tools and technologies.

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.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• 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 be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills 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.