Senior AI & Cloud Solutions Architect

Harvey Nash; England; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Harvey Nash is seeking a Senior Architecture Lead within IT Operations to translate business requirements into robust technology designs across AI, data, cloud, and SaaS platforms. The role emphasizes architectural clarity, governance, and scalable delivery while aligning with financial services standards, including DORA and UK resilience requirements.

The successful candidate will provide strong technical authority, coaching, and standards to delivery teams, ensuring security, cost efficiency

Responsibilities

• AI, Data & Analytics: Shape the architecture for AI-related delivery, spanning data intake, solution design, implementation, monitoring and ongoing operational oversight.
• Align AI engineering approaches with financial services requirements and EU AI Act expectations, including controls for explainability, bias, human oversight, auditability, logging and risk assessment.
• Monitor advances in AI and identify opportunities to improve capability, reduce cost and increase operational efficiency.
• Architecture & Technical Leadership: Define and communicate architecture direction across cloud, AI, data, integration and SaaS platforms, giving delivery teams a shared technical framework.
• Develop and maintain architecture principles, reusable patterns, standards and guardrails for consistent use across the technology estate.
• Support engineering teams with complex AWS and Azure designs, ensuring security, resilience, performance and cost considerations.
• Establish integration approaches across the environment (API-led, event-based, platform-to-platform).
• Encourage cloud-native and cloud-agnostic designs to limit supplier dependency.
• Run architecture spikes and PoCs to test assumptions and reduce delivery risk before major investments.
• Documentation Standards & Governance: Set standards for architecture records with templates and coaching; ensure high-quality artefacts (ADRs, designs, patterns).
• Provide governance over design choices through focused reviews.
• Keep architecture repository accessible, organised and up to date.
• Set non-functional requirements for security, performance, scalability, resilience and disaster recovery.
• Lead on documentation ownership and review points, and evolve IT technology roadmap with stakeholders.
• Review emerging technologies (AI/ML tooling, SaaS) for strategic fit and cost.
• Translate business priorities into sequenced technology initiatives with milestones and outcomes.
• Balance immediate needs with long-term architecture sustainability and cost discipline.
• Apply FinOps practices for AWS/Azure spend while preserving capability and resilience.
• Lead architectural input into vendor and tooling decisions and ensure alignment with governance and roadmap.

Job description

Harvey Nash is seeking a Senior Architecture Lead within IT Operations to translate business requirements into robust technology designs across AI, data, cloud, and SaaS platforms. The role emphasizes architectural clarity, governance, and scalable delivery while aligning with financial services standards, including DORA and UK resilience requirements.

The successful candidate will provide strong technical authority, coaching, and standards to delivery teams, ensuring security, cost efficiency