Principal Application & Product Architect

Wolters Kluwer; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Wolters Kluwer is seeking a Principal Application & Product Architect to lead architectural initiatives across a portfolio of products in the Corporate and Health divisions. You will provide hands-on architectural guidance, translate business strategy into practical designs, and balance delivery speed with reliability, security, and cost.

In this role you will partner with Product Management and Engineering leaders, review architectures, and mentor engineers while ensuring reuse and consistency

Qualifications

• Proven hands-on architectural leadership across SaaS platforms.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures and microservices.
• Experience with data integration and distributed systems.
• Ability to lead architecture reviews and governance.
• Proficiency in modern languages (C#, Python, TypeScript).
• Security, privacy, and regulatory compliance experience.
• Strong mentoring and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead large-scale, customer-facing SaaS architecture balancing velocity, scalability, reliability, security, and cost.
• Partner with Product Management and Engineering leaders to translate product requirements into executable architecture.
• Design cloud-native patterns (microservices, modular monoliths, event-driven).
• Define shared services, internal platforms, and API-first contracts.
• Design data-intensive systems and manage enterprise integrations with API gateways and authentication strategies.
• Lead architectural governance and reference patterns, balancing standards with delivery needs.
• Mentor engineers and lead teams through architectural implementation.

Skills

Product Architecture

Cloud-Native Architecture

Data & Integration

Architectural Governance

Hands-on Development

Security & Compliance

Engineering Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

About the Role

About the Role As a Principal Application & Product Architect, you will lead complex architectural initiatives with significant autonomy, providing expert guidance in designing integrated, innovative solutions aligned with organizational goals and long‑term product strategy. Your contributions will be critical to strategic technology planning and to driving product excellence through high‑quality, scalable, and secure designs. In this role, you will work across multiple product teams, supporting applications within the Corporate business division as well as the Health Division. Rather than being embedded with a single team, you will provide architectural leadership across a portfolio of products, ensuring alignment, consistency, and reuse while accounting for domain‑specific needs. This is not a purely conceptual or advisory role. You are expected to be hands‑on, with the ability to dive into code, prototypes, and proof‑of‑concepts as needed, and to lead by example. You will partner closely with Product Management and Engineering leaders to translate business and product strategy into practical architectural direction that balances delivery speed, reliability, security, and cost.

Skills

1. 1. Product‑Centric Architecture Leadership Strong experience designing and evolving large‑scale, customer‑facing SaaS and internal product platforms. Proven ability to balance delivery velocity, scalability, reliability, security, and cost in architectural decisions. Hands‑on partnership with Product Management and Engineering leaders to translate product requirements into executable architecture.
2. 2. Cloud‑Native & Platform Architecture Expert knowledge of cloud‑native architectures (Azure, AWS, or GCP), including microservices, modular monoliths, and event‑driven patterns. Strong experience with API‑first and contract‑driven design. Understanding of platform engineering concepts such as shared services, internal platforms, and standardized deployment paths.
3. 3. Data, Integration, and Distributed Systems Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including resiliency, fault tolerance, observability, and consistency trade‑offs. Experience designing and integrating data‑intensive systems (transactional, analytical, and messaging‑based). Expertise in enterprise and partner integrations, including API gateways, authentication/authorization, and versioning strategies.
4. 4. Pragmatic Architectural Governance Ability to define and evolve architectural standards and reference patterns that teams actually adopt. Strong judgment to know when to enforce standards and when flexibility is required to enable delivery. Experience leading collaborative, outcome‑focused architecture reviews.
5. 5. Hands‑On Technical Depth Strong background in modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., C#, Python, TypeScript). Ability and willingness to write code, review pull requests, build prototypes, and validate architectural decisions through implementation. Proven credibility leading teams through example, not just documentation.
6. 6. Security, Compliance, and Reliability Experience designing secure systems with identity, data protection, secrets management, and threat modeling in mind. Familiarity with enterprise compliance, privacy, and regulatory requirements. Strong focus on availability, performance, scalability, and operational readiness.
7. 7. Engineering Leadership & Execution Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and domains. Strong mentoring skills for senior engineers and technical leads. Clear communicator who can explain architectural decisions and trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Education

Education Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (required).

Our Interview Practices

Our Interview Practices To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI‑generated responses or third‑party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process. Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.

If making a difference matters to you, then you matter to us. Join us, at Wolters Kluwer, and be part of a dynamic global technology company that makes a difference every day. We’re innovators with impact. We provide expert software and information solutions that the world’s leading professionals rely on, in the moments that matter most. You’ll make a real difference in the lives of millions of people. Together with our customers, we help to advance sustainability, health, justice, prosperity, and commerce around the world. You can thrive at Wolters Kluwer, where diversity is core to our collective strength and high performance. Be your unique self, share your creative ideas, do your best work, and take time to grow in our caring and inclusive culture where you can belong.

Wolters Kluwer reported 2025 annual revenues of €6.1 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs more than 21,000 people worldwide. Our customers work in industries that impact the lives of millions of people every single day. Our mission is to empower our professional customers with the AI-powered solutions they need to make critical decisions, achieve successful outcomes, and increase productivity. We deliver trusted, AI-powered expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge, proprietary content, and advanced technology to provide expert‑validated insights, automate workflows, and drive better outcomes. Today, nearly 70% of our digital revenues come from AI-powered solutions, reflecting our strategic focus on embedding AI into professional workflows and delivering measurable productivity gains. We are committed to helping professionals navigate complexity, improve the way they work, and solve critical challenges through cloud‑based, AI‑powered platforms that integrate seamlessly into their workflows and ecosystems. Our solutions are designed to deliver impact when it matters most, especially in high‑stakes environments where accuracy and trust are essential. With a nearly 190‑year legacy, Wolters Kluwer continues to evolve its portfolio of digital solutions and services to meet the changing needs of professionals worldwide, enabling them to work faster, make smarter decisions, and deliver better outcomes.

For more information about our solutions and organization, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Wolters Kluwer has a dedicated team of experienced talent acquisition professionals who are ready to hear what makes you tick and share how Wolters Kluwer can help you achieve your goals and ambitions. As a global organization, we recognize that solving a wide range of complex problems requires diverse perspectives and innovative thinking. We know that bringing our best to our customers, communities, and other key stakeholders requires a highly engaged and talented workforce – one that represents the diversity of those we serve and the communities where we live and work. We aim to provide a welcoming environment and equitable opportunities for all employees regardless of background, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or religion. This principle is ingrained in our company values and articulated in our Code of Business Ethics. At Wolters Kluwer, you’ll feel valued for your contributions, and you’ll know that your health, safety, and well‑being are important to us. Our well‑being benefits provide tools, programs, and resources to help our diverse employees feel healthy, happy, safe, and prosperous. Our global Together we thrive well‑being program reflects our commitment to supporting colleagues across physical, mental, social, and financial well‑being. That commitment has been recognized externally through Ragan’s Top Places to Work for Employee Wellbeing: Large Organization in 2024. More recently, Wolters Kluwer was recognized by Forbesas one of America’sBestLarge Employers2026 and America’sBest Employers for Engineers2026. In 2025WoltersKluwerwasalso…