Lead Architect in London

JOB BAND: E
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time
LOCATION: London - TVC
DEPARTMENT: Engineering .com team
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £85,000 - £100,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. Plus London Weighting Allowance of £5,441 and a 15% bonus OTE. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application - though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Purpose of the Role

A Lead Architect is accountable for creating the conditions in which good architectural decisions emerge across teams. Rather than acting as a central authority or approval gate, the architect operates as a facilitator, shaping direction, enabling teams, and ensuring that local decisions align with broader system goals, organisational strategy, and long-term sustainability. This role exists to optimise the system as a whole - not individual components - balancing autonomy with coherence across a complex, evolving technology landscape.

Why Join The Team

This is a high-impact role at the heart of how we evolve our technology and product operating model. You'll work with senior stakeholders and engineering teams to simplify complexity, modernise our platforms, and deliver meaningful outcomes for the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Facilitate architectural thinking within teams rather than owning decisions centrally
• Support engineers and tech leads in evaluating trade-offs (e.g. scalability, operability, cost, coupling, resilience)
• Encourage explicit decision-making through lightweight artefacts (e.g. ADRs, design narratives)
• Ensure decisions are made at the right level - pushing ownership to teams wherever possible
• Set clear architectural direction through principles, patterns, and sensible defaults
• Establish and evolve paved roads and golden paths that make good decisions the easiest decisions
• Avoid heavyweight governance (e.g. design authorities, approval boards) in favour of guidance and enablement
• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Delivery leadership to ensure alignment between business goals, product strategy, and technology direction
• Help shape decisions around build vs buy, platform vs product, and long-term investment
• Coach and mentor engineers and tech leads in architectural thinking

Essential Criteria

• Strong experience designing and evolving distributed systems
• Deep understanding of architectural trade-offs (e.g. coupling, cohesion, consistency, scalability)
• Familiarity with evolutionary architecture practices (e.g. fitness functions, incremental change)
• Experience with modern engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, cloud-native systems)
• Proven ability to influence without authority across multiple teams
• Strong facilitation skills - able to guide discussions and surface trade-offs
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and complexity
• Able to challenge constructively and build alignment across diverse stakeholders

Desired but Not Required

• Experience working in large-scale digital or media organisations
• Familiarity with modern product operating models and outcome-driven delivery approaches
• Exposure to financial planning, vendor management or commercial technology decisions

Benefits

• A flexible 35-hour working week with 26 days annual leave (plus bank holidays) and the option to buy an extra five days
• Defined pension (up to 10% employer contributions)
• Caring and parenting support, 24/7 remote GP access, life assurance and accident benefit
• BBC Studios is a world leader in operating sustainably both on and off screen. Find out more about BBC Group's science-based Net Zero targets here
• Career development in a values-led purpose-driven culture
• Benefits may vary if you are joining on an FTC basis

Equal Employment Opportunity

We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.

Disability Confident

We are a disability confident employer. If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, or to carry out this role, please contact us via email and we'd be happy to discuss:

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