Guildford Business Park Guildford Surrey GU2 8XG, United Kingdom
Role: Solution Architect
Location: Guildford Business Park Guildford Surrey GU2 8XG (4 days remote/1 day onsite)
Is it Permanent / Contract: FTE
Is it Onsite/Remote/Hybrid: Remote with occasional office visit (4 days remote & 1 day onsite in a week
Responsibilities
You will:
- Produce proposals and justify the value of technology strategies to senior business audiences
- Drive alignment of the technology landscape with the enterprise target picture, including system retirement
- Ensure that architecture, divergences, and risks are clearly communicated and agreed by all stakeholders
- Convey architecture decisions through a variety of communication techniques to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Lead architectural design authorities for projects, and work within enterprise architectural governance and enterprise portfolio management frameworks
- Translate business requirements into technology, service, and security deliverables, identifying risks and proposing appropriate mitigations
- Identify all areas of architectural, technical, and security risk, and ensure these are managed with the cooperation of appropriate stakeholders
- Produce (or ensure production of) all architectural deliverables under the development methodology, including solution designs, architecture patterns, technical infrastructure designs and supporting documentation
- Provide design assurance for solution architecture to ensure solutions are implemented as designed, to the correct standards and quality
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other solution architects within the team
- Self-manage day-to-day architecture priorities and delivery workload
Skills and Experience
Your skills and experience include:
- Strong interpersonal and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to interact at all business levels — from the CEO and C-suite through to technical SMEs, developers, testers, and project managers
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to assess the audience and pitch / influence appropriately
- Working across enterprise technologies, including prior SME roles across infrastructure, cloud, and application domains
- Defining, documenting, and architecting solutions across hybrid, on-premise, and public cloud estates, potentially requiring integration with legacy technologies for large projects and programmes
- Supporting and designing mission-critical infrastructure solutions across a wide variety of technologies
- IT security and risk management within an architecture role
- Experience working within architectural design authorities and governance forums
- Technical selection and RFI/RFP processes, including supplier assurance of third-party products and contractual due diligence including drafting statements of requirements for third parties or commenting on vendor statements of work (SoW)
- Working in a highly regulated environment (e.g. financial services)
- Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) and waterfall methodologies along with associated toolsets (such as Jira)
- Use of documentation tools such as Atlassian Confluence along with diagramming or architectural modelling tools and languages (draw.io, Sparx, ADOIT, ArchiMate, Mermaid, C4)
- Broad knowledge of IT technologies and architectural styles and patterns (e.g. event-driven, serverless, microservices, SOA, layered architectures)
- Supporting implementation and solution design for large public cloud implementations, preferably both AWS and Azure
- Supporting implementation and technical design across core technologies (Windows, Linux, VMware, Hyper‑V, web, database, security gateways, LAN/WAN networking)
- Designing solutions involving middleware and integration including JBoss / WebLogic, enterprise service bus / message queueing / integration platforms (iPaaS) such as RabbitMQ, MuleSoft, Boomi, Kafka
- Designing (including requirements traceability) secure, high performing, and highly available technology solutions
- Knowledge of continuous integration and deployment processes, methods, and tools
- Providing architectural support and assurance to DevOps teams, with application of agile practices
- Ability to work with cutting-edge AI LLM technologies, producing work in conjunction with models such as Anthropic Claude, whilst experimenting and exploring different methods of co-working with AI
Education and Qualifications
Your education and qualifications should include:
- Degree or HND in information technology, or equivalent experience
- Relevant technical and business qualifications (e.g. Microsoft or AWS certifications, TOGAF, ITIL)
- Evidence of your commitment to continuous learning.