Technical Architect

IPS Group Limited; City Of London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A specialist insurance company is looking for an experienced Technical Architect to take ownership of their enterprise technology landscape. You will define integration strategies and lead API design, ensuring security and performance across platforms. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in integration architecture and expertise in Microsoft Azure technologies. This position is critical for the company’s modernization efforts and offers opportunities for career growth.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in senior technical roles with 5+ years as an architect.
• Advanced knowledge of integration and technical architecture.
• Extensive experience in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Define integration strategy and governance.
• Lead API design and documentation.
• Develop secure architectures for AI technologies.

Skills

API implementation

Integration architecture

RESTful design

Azure DevOps

Communication skills

Tools

Azure Service Bus

GitLab CI

Azure Databricks

Azure API Management

Job description

About the Organisation

Our client is a specialist insurer and reinsurer operating globally, with a focus on complex commercial and industrial risks. The business combines deep sector expertise with advanced use of data, analytics, and modern technology to deliver informed, efficient, and fair underwriting decisions. The company is in a period of significant growth and is committed to maintaining a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture. Employees are encouraged to ask questions, explore new ideas, work openly with others, and operate with clarity and simplicity. The environment is dynamic, supportive, and designed to enable long‑term career progression.

Role Summary

Our client is seeking an experienced Technical Architect with strong expertise in integration architecture, systems design best practice, and API design. The role will take technical ownership of the organisation’s enterprise technology landscape. This is a pivotal position within the company’s scaling and modernisation programme. The successful candidate will act as the bridge between internally developed underwriting platforms, the data lakehouse and analytics estate, and a range of commercial off‑the‑shelf (COTS) applications used across operations, finance, and support functions. You will be responsible for defining standards, blueprints, and governance for how core systems interact, ensuring security, performance, scalability, and data quality across the entire ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

Integration Architecture

• Define the enterprise‑wide integration strategy, including the governance of integration patterns (such as synchronous APIs, event‑driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, and batch ETL).


• Lead the design and documentation of internal and external APIs, ensuring best practice in RESTful design, versioning, and OpenAPI standards.


• Work with Engineering and Data teams to standardise the technical approach for messaging, data extraction, transformation, and load (ETL/ELT) processes across underwriting, finance, accounting, and data warehouse systems.


• Design secure, scalable, and auditable architectures for Generative AI, Agentic AI, and large language model (LLM) technologies.


• Collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and developers to integrate and deploy AI models from development through to production.


• Define security standards for all integration points, including OAuth, API key management, encryption, and network segmentation within an Azure environment.

Platform Architecture

• Provide technical input into new platform selections and project implementations, ensuring alignment with architectural principles.


• Work closely with Engineering leadership on the design and evolution of the .NET and Angular technology stack, focusing on modularity, microservices, performance, and technical debt management.


• Collaborate with the Data Architecture function to ensure alignment between the enterprise architecture and the organisation’s data platform, including optimisation of the Databricks environment.


• Establish and govern non‑functional requirements (NFRs) covering performance, scalability, resilience, and disaster recovery.

Technical Design & Governance

• Translate business strategy into an executable architecture roadmap.


• Conduct architectural and code reviews to ensure alignment with agreed standards.


• Present technical recommendations, solution designs, and trade‑off considerations to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.


• Serve as the final escalation point for complex technical design challenges and technology selections.


• Mentor engineers across software, infrastructure, and data disciplines in architectural best practice and emerging technologies.

Essential Experience & Skills

• At least 10 years in senior technical roles, including 5+ years as an architect specialising in software development, integration, and technical architecture.


• Advanced knowledge of API implementation, message queues (e.g., Azure Service Bus, Kafka), and event‑driven architecture.


• Deep expertise in RESTful API design, API gateways (ideally Azure API Management), and the OpenAPI specification.


• Strong understanding of DevOps practices and hands‑on experience with CI/CD tooling such as Azure DevOps or GitLab CI.


• Extensive knowledge of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, covering IaaS and PaaS, with particular experience in Azure Databricks, Data Factory, and ADLS Gen2.


• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to influence diverse technical teams.

Desirable Experience

• Background in the insurance, reinsurance, or wider financial services industry.


• Strong architectural understanding of the .NET/C# ecosystem and modern front‑end frameworks (ideally Angular).


• Experience with data architecture concepts including relational, NoSQL, and data lake technologies.


• Knowledge of cloud‑based AI architectures, including LLMs, Generative AI, and Agentic AI.


• Experience integrating proprietary systems with COTS finance or ERP platforms, particularly within general ledger, financial close, or regulatory reporting domains.