Solution Architect

Location: Bristol

Salary: £68,202 - £75,780

Hours: Full time

Working Pattern: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in office.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you!

About this opportunity

This vacancy is in the Business and Commercial Banking (BCB) division, within the Client Servicing & Engagement (CSE) platform. Our purpose is to create and deliver products that enable clients to grow their businesses. Those businesses provide services that millions of customers across the UK rely upon, day-to-day and especially in their time of need. It means a big opportunity for you to be part of ground-breaking transformation and it means there’s never been a more exciting time to join.

As we build our own applications, we need solution architects with a specific set of skills and experiences in a digital development. Knowing and understanding how modern software applications are built and delivered is key.

You must be a keen and comfortable communicator who is happy working with a wide range of technical and non-technical colleagues. You would be able to produce high quality documentation tailored to the audience which would include senior stakeholders. As a role that can require demanding delivery timeframes, you'll need to be self-organised and be able to proactively prioritise your time.

What you’ll do 

• Collaborate with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Enterprise Architects & Engineers to create the Architectural runway for our Platform teams
• Be responsible for our application architecture and the delivery of our engineering design deliverables and managing architecture decisions through formal governance processes
• Manage the IT Roadmap, driving best practice initiatives
• Ensure IT compliance and governance policies are met
• Partner with fellow solution architects & service providers to elaborate on solutions, their interfaces and validating technology assumptions, evaluating implementation alternatives and software lifecycle risks, assumptions, issues & dependencies.
• Provide analysis of options and deliver end-to-end solution designs using relevant architectural building blocks as well as producing designs for features that enable frequent incremental customer value delivery.
• Promote adaptive design practises to drive collaboration across Platform teams centring on a common vision with continuous feedback.
• Capture technical design risks or issues and drive resolution through architectural or agile practices.

What you’ll need

• Prior experience in a solution architecture position
• Strong understanding of building applications through containerised microservices-based architectures, with a working-to-strong understanding of cloud methodologies
• Working knowledge of infrastructure and security architecture practices and concerns
• Have played an active part in architecture and design governance
• Experience of Single Page Applications using technologies such as ReactJS, AngularJS or equivalent
• Experience of Mobile Native & Cross Platform Apps for Apple iOS, Android or ReactNative
• Experience of API Gateways & Management Platforms such as IBM API Connect, IBM DataPower, Apigee, Microsoft Azure API Manager, or similar
• Event Driven Architectures & Streaming Platforms
• Cloud Platform as a Service or similar offerings
• Experience of Java

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in/all its forms.

We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%.
• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance.
• Share schemes including free shares.
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top.
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies.