Solution Architect

Barclays Bank Plc; Sworton Heath; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays Bank Plc is seeking a Solution Architect within Cards and Payments to drive architectural design for resilience, insider threat, and related projects. You will collaborate with Business Analysts to produce solution designs and champion the architecture strategy across infrastructure, data, and software engineering domains.

The role requires strong leadership, ability to balance technology risk with business delivery, and experience communicating with senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Experience with enterprise-scale infrastructure and integration, cloud and on-premise architectures.
• Strong security mindset aligned with resiliency and governance.
• Proven technical leadership and ability to influence at CxO level.
• Experience in risk, controls, and architectural governance are advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop solutions that can evolve as products, aligning with business requirements.
• Apply workload placement strategies to maximise cloud elasticity, serverless, and containerisation benefits.
• Incorporate security principles and risk mitigations into architecture designs.
• Balance risks and controls to deliver business and technology value.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to produce solution designs and satisfy governance processes.

Skills

Infrastructure & integration

Cloud & on‑premise

Security best practice

Technical leadership

Stakeholder management (CxO)

Data architecture

Job description

Join us as a Solution Architect required within Cards and Payments to provide coverage of architectural domains and meet project demand. You will be assigned projects- Resilience and Insider Threat and you will own these projects and you will work with Business Analysts to produce solution designs. The work will be varied, involving some infrastructural, but up to data architecture and software engineering will be required. You will need to understand AI, working to roadmaps and promoting / championing our to architecture strategy., 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 elevate 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.

To be successful as a Solution Architect, you should have experience with;

• Infrastructure and integration, cloud and on-premise, and associated security best practise, at enterprise-scale.
• Experience in one or more of the following domains: Physical Security, Threat Intelligence, Insider Threat, Cyber Forensics, Resilience.
• Strong technical leadership and communication. Stakeholder management to CxO-level.

Some other highly valued skills may include;

• Any background in Software Engineering and/or Data Architecture.
• Experience in Financial Services or a similarly regulated environment.
• Appetite for learning new technologies, including AI, Agile and Automation etc.

• You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills

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.