Portfolio Lead Solution Architect Director

Boston Consulting Group; Greater London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading consulting firm in Greater London seeks a Portfolio Architect to drive digital transformation initiatives. The ideal candidate will possess a strong technical background in IT architecture with over 15 years of experience, focusing on scalable architectures, API management, and Agile methodologies. The role involves collaboration across teams to define technology solutions, optimizing for risks and innovation while ensuring alignment with organizational goals.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of relevant IT architecture experience.
• Experience with scalable architectures and API management.
• Demonstrated experience communicating complex system architecture to senior leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own and influence architecture decisions across the Portfolio.
• Create reference architecture focused on design principles.
• Analyze the business-IT environment to detect deficiencies.

Skills

Agile methodologies

Cloud-oriented strategies

Data architecture expertise

Problem solving

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in information science, data management, computer science or related field

TOGAF or similar architecture certification (nice to have)

Tools

Serverless technologies

SaaS low-code platform-tools

Azure

AWS

Job description

Locations

Boston, London, Munich

What We Are

Boston Consulting Group partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. BCG was the pioneer in business strategy when it was founded in 1963. Today, we help clients with total transformation—inspiring complex change, enabling organizations to grow, building competitive advantage, and driving bottom-line impact.

To succeed, organizations must blend digital and human capabilities. Our diverse, global teams bring deep industry and functional expertise and a range of perspectives to spark change. BCG delivers solutions through leading-edge management consulting along with technology and design, corporate and digital ventures—and business purpose. We work in a uniquely collaborative model across the firm and throughout all levels of the client organization, generating results that allow our clients to thrive.

What You\'ll Do

To realize our digital transformation, we need to transform our products, experiences, processes, technology and how we operate. We are looking for people who are passionate about Agile ways of working and want to spread this approach within our teams and business processes. To execute this transformation, we need people who take the lead in defining standards and guardrails of working and developing expertise within the portfolio. As portfolio architect you will define and design technology solutions that optimize our solutions for rapid innovation whilst also making sure we manage risks such as cyber security and operational resilience. You will act as pioneer, thought leader, problem solver, and be sought out for your expertise by product and engineering teams. In your role you will bridge enterprise architecture and engineering and will own the design products and solutions within the Risk portfolio. Using proven BCG\'s DDP architecture framework to identify, own and advance the digital transformation in the portfolio. You will optimize against many requirements such as functional needs, quality attributes (e.g., security, usability), cost, sustainability, and enterprise-wide goals (e.g., cloud and API enablement, AI). You document architecture views and deliver architecture artefacts required by the delivery process and enable teams to maximize automation in the CI/CD pipeline. Moreover, you will be a hands-on participant in architecture proof of concepts, innovation initiatives, and performance tuning activities. Researching/analyzing emerging technologies, as well as designing and advocating new technologies, architectures, and products in collaboration with system and service owners is part of your profile. You will identify risks within proposed solution architectures and develop mitigation plans, ensuring that solution architectures are scalable and sustainable for operations. You propose architectural epics and stories to implement the architectural runway and clear technical debt, document quality attributes in epics & stories, and define acceptance criteria.

Responsibilities

• Own and influence architecture decisions across the Portfolio, ensuring alignment with BCG standards and design principles.
• Own the annual DDP refresh (Data & Digital Platforms) architecture for the portfolio covering tech maturity, road mapping, integrations, security, and data strategies.
• Create reference architecture focused on design principles, detailed APIs, and major systems dependencies between business and IT.
• Define principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure decisions align with the enterprise architect vision.
• Analyze the business-IT environment to detect deficiencies, legacy, and technical debt and recommend improvements.
• Author the strategic architecture for the Portfolio to meet business requirements.
• Stay up to date with emerging technology trends to innovate and champion modern technologies/frameworks/tools where appropriate.

You're Good At

To be successful, you should bring sound development and architecture experience leveraging technologies to drive technical governance, innovation, integration and cloud-oriented strategies. You thrive in a work environment that requires strong problem solving, analytical and decision-making skills, and independent self-direction, coupled with collaboration and open communication.

• Thought leadership in technology innovation and transformation.
• Partnering with the Product Portfolio Lead, Technical Area Lead and Enterprise Architects to envision and deliver the architectural roadmap for the portfolio.
• Translating business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documenting all solution architecture design and analysis work.
• Leading evaluation, analysis, and design for the implementation of a solution architecture.
• Collaborating with cross-functional groups and prioritizing workload and projects to ensure timely delivery.
• Valuing simplicity and challenging technical constraints to enable an agile, high-performing team.
• Partnering with Product Owners and technical leadership with a data-driven approach to decisions.
• Committing to cross-functional collaboration to achieve the best results for the organization.
• Building enterprise-grade, scalable solutions that add long-term value to the firm.
• High initiative, self-motivation, resourcefulness and collaboration.
• Building relationships and being a reliable team player.
• Performing well in a fast-paced, multi-cultural environment.
• Interpreting rules flexibly to align with BCG\'s values and culture.
• Exhibiting ownership and accountability for yourself and the team.
• Attention to detail, organization, prioritization, and decision-making.
• Flexibility to be available outside normal business hours for international calls as needed.

What You'll Bring

Education and Certifications

• Bachelor\'s degree in information science, data management, computer science or related field.
• 15+ years of relevant IT architecture experience with a strong technical background, preferably in large international organizations.
• Experience with scalable architectures, API management, serverless technologies, and SaaS low-code platform-tools/technologies.
• Demonstrated experience communicating complex system architecture technologies, patterns, artifacts, and roadmaps to senior leadership.
• Understanding of technology-enabled business transformation, digital transformation, and large enterprise projects.
• Knowledge of Agile methodologies and servant-leader mindset; able to engage in Agile ceremonies for direction and guidance.
• Nice to have: TOGAF or similar architecture certification.

Functional/Technical Skills

• Strong experience as an IT architect in complex and heterogeneous environments.
• End-to-end architecture design and implementation across platforms.
• Expertise in integrating SaaS solutions in complex environments.
• Domain experience in Risk solutions and leading a Risk Transformation project.
• Data architecture expertise and related technologies.
• Experience collaborating with Agile teams and reviewing architecture against quality standards.
• Knowledge of modern design patterns and SOA/Microservices with REST APIs.
• Experience with AI/ML integration, MLOps pipelines, and orchestration of AI services.
• Experience with on-premises and cloud infrastructures, SDLC pipelines, and DevSecOps practices on Azure or AWS.
• Strong focus on re-use, reliability, and performance for a global audience.
• Understanding of testing, diagnostics, and performance tuning; knowledge of TDD/BDD.
• Experience with data ingestion pipelines and front-end frameworks (Angular, React, Vue).