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- Tasks: Lead architectural strategy and ensure alignment across product teams for innovative solutions.
- Company: Accelerant, a forward-thinking tech company focused on insights and analytics.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Join a culture that values collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
- Why this job: Shape the future of technology while collaborating with talented teams in a dynamic environment.
- Qualifications: 8-12 years in software engineering, strong leadership skills, and experience with AI tools.
The predicted salary is between 72000 - 108000 £ per year.
Accelerant is seeking a Product Area Lead Architect to provide hands-on, operational architectural leadership for our Insights, Analytics & Workflows product area. This role operates at a Principal level, influencing architecture and execution across multiple autonomous product teams. You will work closely with team architects, engineering managers, product managers, and Data Science teams to ensure teams move fast without fragmenting the architecture. This is not an ivory tower architecture role. It is highly collaborative, pragmatic, and operational, focused on identifying architectural gaps, managing dependencies, and enabling teams to execute confidently within a shared architectural framework. You will champion standards-based architecture, leveraging web standards, open protocols, and industry conventions to build interoperable, accessible, and future-proof systems.
Key Responsibilities
- Operational Architectural Leadership
- Ensure architectural alignment across product teams, partnering closely with team architects and engineering managers.
- Proactively identify architectural gaps, technical debt, and quality risks; drive resolution through collaboration and influence.
- Manage cross-team technical dependencies to enable independent, parallel execution.
- Translate architectural strategy into clear, actionable guidance that teams can apply sprint by sprint.
- Cross Team Coordination & Alignment
- Facilitate architectural discussions and resolve technical conflicts across teams through principled, pragmatic decision making.
- Act as an escalation point for complex cross-team technical challenges.
- Ensure architectural decisions are clearly communicated, understood, and consistently applied.
- Design and Innovation
- Define and maintain architectural patterns across backend services, APIs, data platforms, and front-end systems.
- Design scalable, resilient systems for analytics, workflow orchestration, and intelligence features.
- Guide decomposition of legacy systems into well-defined services and domains.
- Evaluate technologies and data stores, favouring open standards and long-term maintainability.
- Architect distributed systems with focus on reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability.
- Standards & Governance
- Establish API design standards ensuring consistency, discoverability, and ease of integration.
- Define front-end standards prioritising web platform capabilities, progressive enhancement, and accessibility (WCAG).
- Create governance frameworks that balance standardisation with team autonomy.
- Drive adoption of industry standards (OAuth2, OpenID Connect, OpenTelemetry, JSON:API) over proprietary alternatives.
- Technical Leadership
- Partner with engineering teams on design reviews, PR reviews, and implementation guidance.
- Establish standards for cross-cutting concerns: API versioning, auth, observability, error handling, and resiliency patterns.
- Collaborate with platform and DevOps teams on containerisation, CI/CD, and cloud-native deployment.
- Produce clear technical design documentation that drives alignment and knowledge sharing.
- Mentor engineers and raise the overall architectural maturity of the organisation.
- GenAI, ML & AI Architecture
- Architect customer-facing GenAI features using LLMs, including RAG pipelines, prompt engineering frameworks, and conversational AI interfaces.
- Define patterns for ML model integration: serving endpoints, API contracts, versioning, and health monitoring.
- Partner with Data Science to translate models into production-grade features with clear integration contracts and deployment workflows.
- Establish standards for responsible AI, including evaluation criteria, privacy guardrails, and LLM output validation.
- AI Transformation & Productivity Leadership
- Scale AI-driven development workflows across teams, ensuring engineers leverage AI coding tools effectively.
- Guide team architects and coach senior engineers on using AI tools to enhance productivity and code quality.
- Work hands-on with teams to identify opportunities for AI to solve operational challenges and improve velocity.
- Solution Evaluation & Quality Assurance
- Evaluate and recommend technologies to enhance capabilities across analytics, workflow, and intelligence domains.
- Ensure architectural integrity through code reviews, assessments, and continuous monitoring.
- Proactively identify technical risks and devise strategies for reliability, security, and performance.
Technical Requirements
- Full Stack SaaS Architecture: Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js. Deep knowledge of web platform fundamentals and browser native capabilities. Experience designing and evolving well-structured APIs for platform integrations.
- Architectural & Systems Thinking: Deep knowledge of architecture principles, design patterns, and distributed systems. Proven ability to make pragmatic trade-offs in complex, evolving systems. Experience in cloud-native environments, preferably AWS.
- AI Enabled Engineering: Demonstrated experience using AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.). Understanding of AI applications for development productivity and code quality improvement.
Qualifications
- 8 to 12+ years in software engineering and architecture roles.
- Proven experience operating across multiple agile teams in an architectural leadership capacity.
- Track record of managing cross-team dependencies and bridging architectural vision with day-to-day execution.
- Proven ability to drive AI adoption and transformation within engineering organisations.
- Excellent communication and facilitation skills with ability to align work across distributed teams.
- Pragmatic, operational mindset with strong problem-solving abilities.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Lead Architect in Newcastle upon Tyne employer: Accelerant
Contact Detail:
Accelerant Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land Lead Architect in Newcastle upon Tyne
✨Tip Number 1
Network like a pro! Get out there and connect with folks in the industry. Attend meetups, webinars, or even just grab a coffee with someone who’s already in the role you want. You never know who might have the inside scoop on job openings!
✨Tip Number 2
Show off your skills! Create a portfolio or GitHub repository showcasing your projects and contributions. This is your chance to demonstrate your architectural prowess and hands-on experience, making you stand out from the crowd.
✨Tip Number 3
Prepare for those interviews! Research common questions for Lead Architect roles and practice your responses. Be ready to discuss how you've tackled architectural challenges in the past and how you can bring value to the team at Accelerant.
✨Tip Number 4
Don’t forget to apply through our website! It’s the best way to ensure your application gets seen by the right people. Plus, it shows you’re genuinely interested in joining our team and contributing to our mission.
We think you need these skills to ace Lead Architect in Newcastle upon Tyne
Some tips for your application 🫡
Tailor Your Application: Make sure to customise your CV and cover letter for the Lead Architect role. Highlight your experience in operational architectural leadership and how you've influenced teams in the past. We want to see how you can fit into our collaborative environment!
Showcase Your Technical Skills: Don’t hold back on showcasing your technical expertise! Mention your proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, and any experience with AI coding tools. We’re looking for someone who can hit the ground running, so let us know what you bring to the table.
Be Clear and Concise: When writing your application, keep it clear and to the point. Use bullet points where possible to make it easy for us to read. We appreciate straightforward communication, especially when it comes to complex architectural concepts!
Apply Through Our Website: We encourage you to apply directly through our website. It’s the best way for us to receive your application and ensures you don’t miss out on any important updates. Plus, we love seeing applications come through our own channels!
How to prepare for a job interview at Accelerant
✨Know Your Architecture Inside Out
Make sure you have a solid understanding of architectural principles and design patterns, especially those relevant to the role. Be prepared to discuss how you've applied these in past projects, particularly in cloud-native environments like AWS.
✨Showcase Your Collaboration Skills
This role is all about teamwork, so be ready to share examples of how you've worked with cross-functional teams. Highlight your experience in resolving technical conflicts and managing dependencies to keep projects on track.
✨Demonstrate Your Pragmatic Approach
Prepare to discuss how you've made practical trade-offs in complex systems. Interviewers will want to see that you can balance ideal solutions with operational realities, so have some real-world examples at the ready.
✨Emphasise Your AI Experience
Given the focus on AI-driven development, be sure to talk about your experience with AI coding tools and how you've leveraged them to improve productivity. Share specific instances where you've integrated AI into your architectural decisions.